For me main progress of steemit is that steem coin adopted and used more around the world.
First of all we have a big lists of dapps that are build on steem blockchain:
You can see them in https://www.stateofthedapps.com/dapps/platform/steem?page=1 , right now there are 53 dapps,
biggest are:
eSteem,Steemmonsters,Steemhunt,busy,actifit,partiko and so on.
Steemmonsters are using steem as payment and got daily transactions of 59 809 STEEM/ 24 067 USD .
But dapps are not biggest in my opinion thing, now with steem we can eat in 6 restaurants around the world:
in Germany,Guatemala,South Korea, Luxembourg,Malaysia and Mauritius.
more details you can find in https://steemeconomy.com/list/restaurants/
Also you can buy and sell steem on ~ 14+ exchanges with biggest one is Binance.
https://steemeconomy.com/steem-and-sbd-exchanges/
We got Gambling services which works with steem like: Steem poker league 
Plus we got bunch of services and website where you can pay with steem like : Mike’s Jewelry,Silver Dawn Jewelry and so on, more details on :
https://steemeconomy.com/list/e-commerce/
Overall mainly progress of it was in 2018 , yea we lost a lot in terms of steem price value ( from ~4 to 0.4) , but we gained a lot of progress in steem adoption and its just beginning, i hope in future many shops,restaurants,hotels will accept steem and people will use steem more and more because of speedy transaction and no fee.
What you think , will steem expand more in 2019? Where is best area to focus for steem on adoption for masses?