I think the big Mastodon push last year has made things a little bit easier for Lemmy. Basic awareness of the fediverse has broken into the mainstream of social media, rather than being a niche interest of Free Software enthusiasts.

Now that Lemmy's gotten this initial nudge of mainstream support, I'll be far more engaged here than I ever was on Reddit.

This may seem a tad ironic since I'm posting here in the fediverse, but I think we should also be encouraging a variety of alternative, self-hostable options, e.g. Postmill (similar to reddit but not federated), Discourse (more of a classic forum structure but with some modernizations), etc.

Not everyone will want to try to figure out federation/ActivityPub, and that's okay, because there are more options that folks can spin up. The fediverse, imo, benefits as much from other self-hosted sites as it does from those that connect with it.

There are enough people posting to see a fresh dozen or so posts an hour my Subscribed > New feed and I don't have a ton of subs, mostly STEM. Honestly a few days ago that was a crazy pipe dream. With this kind of mass threshold passed, we only need to expand the scope/quality of posts and this can be a permanent home that organically draws people to the platform. I think we need a page on the major instances that show the plans and limitations of those hosting the instance and where they need support. Like learning Ruud has a bunch of other federated .world servers and seeing his remarkable ability to handle scale makes me much more confident to be here.