Here are 3 things why I believe the future of Ruby can be bright:

1) Lots of modern libraries are growing very fast these days
2) Modern Ruby implementations are in the works, and they show very promising improvements in performance. Especially TruffleRuby[1] and Ruby+OMR[2]
3) Rails seems to have less influence on the ecosystem these days (controversial? maybe)

1) http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/
2) https://developer.ibm.com/open/2016/11/18/introducing-ruby-jit/