Well, in my opinion, there are plenty of reasons for Steem's problems.

I started to wonder if there are (and what) alternatives to Steem. There are a lot of them, but I was most interested in ActivityPub protocol and the biggest interface - Mastodon.

That's why in 2016 (October) the Mastodon project was created, which today has 4 million users and 500k - 1m of active users.

My observations:

• Mastodon is a very good interface, I don't think there is such a good one on Steem.
• ActivityPub projects are high quality (Peertube, Pleroma, Fedilab etc)
• There's a lot of nerds.

Especially the third point is the most important in my opinion. Programmers, server administrators, developers are most often nerds. But do we have these nerds on Steem?

There are always a few of them, but most of them are gone. Steem from the plankton / minnow side is a difficult network. Somebody may not like your post and give you a flag. You can create a project and devote a lot of time to it, but if you don't have good relations with whales, it won't succeed.

I have an online store project on Steem. A lot of people say it's the best application on Steem. I believe it is, but what if it's losing out because of price drops? I have to either invest in Bidbot (which will probably never pay for itself) or try to achieve something by being a small, meaningless project.

Some people say that it's over and they don't care about Steem anymore.

I personally am shocked by the development of projects in the Lightning network. There are a lot of nerds in Bitcoin!