It is what it is. I have no idea how to incite a new wave short of Reddit shitting itself in some way

I think what we can try to do is to create an active community.

In the old place, I recognized I really came for the comments. That’s why I try to keep my threshold for commenting low and comment often.

Even if it’s just to thank someone for a good comment or other low effort commenting, I like to think it helps.

We definitely need better onboarding. I am pushing for this on piefed via directs to [email protected] for new users to introduce themselves

I’m not a programmer so I can’t speak to how hard this is, but I think it would be a big asset to building user base if there was a neutral sign up website that wasn’t a specific instance. It would basically choose an instance for you automatically and skip that part. I figure there could be some list of general purpose instances compiled that are all fair game and the site would try to spread the load across instances.

Average user doesn’t care about federation, and all of that complexity is a big turn off. I know because I almost didn’t sign up myself because of that. Having to pick a team just to get in the door feels kinda bad.

I was in the same boat as you regarding signing up. I also agree with you that the concept of federation might be confusing for new users. Just gave up at the promt to explore other instances (in lemmy.world sign up) and signed up to lemmy.world.