The 1/2 month seems to match Lycoris/LoCon, which as I understand (haven’t dug into the details on this) is a newer refinement of LoRa. LoRa has been used for longer, correct.

The LyCORIS/LoCon repo started committing 1 month ago and almost no one is using it except for a few experiments (not even the automatic webui supports it without a plugin).

Judging from activity on Civitai, I think “almost no one is using it except for a few experiments” is very wrong. Sure, A1111 needs a plugin for it; it needs a plugin for ControlNET, too, but that is also quite popular.

I'm also judging from the activity on CivitAI, the most downloaded (>1000 downloads, not many) ones are actually just LoRA with LoCon in another (experimental) branch of the CivitAI page, definitely not "very wrong" ahah

>it needs a plugin for ControlNET

The big difference is that ControlNet actually required a pretty complex interface to be used effectively, meanwhile the use of LoCon/LyCORIS should be completely transparent and works like a LoRA

ControlNet is built in as of maybe two weeks ago and no longer requires an extension. I started using it when the built-in support arrived and have had a lot of fun with it since.

4 months? I don't think so, people really start using LoRA when it was added to the diffusers library less than 2 months ago, this library is used by the training plugin of automatic webui, I guess time seems to flow more slowly when many things happen.