If you make software YOU want to use, and develop it solid, feature-complete, and stable, the rest will come.   You can spend your whole life trying to chase the trends of what others say they want to have though, and you'll never get there. 

As much as people complain about thing X not having feature Y or Z they like, or doing things weirdly, people usually end up remaining with the most stable thing that provides all the features they want in the environment they want to run it.

This is why of all the FOSS microblogging software, GNU software is by a large margin the most prevalent.