Wait for the centralised thing to fuck something up (and they will), then say "hey I've been using this to get away from all the bullshit of [service name]"

In the mean time, post & comment. The more content & discussion there is, the more attractive it will be to others. If you've got a niche hobby you're passionate about, get a community going or try to grow an existing one if it already exists.

I comment way more on Lemmy than I was doing on Reddit towards the end, partly because the people here are generally good to chat to, but also because I want this place to keep being good so I can continue to keep using it.

Mildly unrelated point that I wanted to say here, ive found that I can now find the answers to a lot of my questions by putting lemmy in the search bar instead of reddit. There definetly arent as many results but they are usually higher quality than redits.

I just link people to good posts I find on here.

You're not going to get a typical apathetic person to change anything.

Hmmmm, I find that to be a fools errand as long as Reddit is "alive and kicking".

It took a troublesome Windows 11 for people to start migrating to Linux (even though I firmly believe that the numbers of poeple switching to Linux are inflated). (I myself am a Linux user).

Or to be more blunt. Reddit functions in something that can be called Mature Product Phase, and/or Saturated Market. And as long as you have a big main Brand that isn't suddendly making bad decisions, you'll always remain a niche product. Take Coca-cola for example. For 99% of people the default choice is Coca-cola, not because they have a strong prefence for it, but because it's an easy and safe choice.

People who drink other brands drink it BECAUSE ______________ . And as long as Coca-Cola doesn't do something to give that BECAUSE to the average Joe there's just no incentive to switch.

The same goes for Reddit. We're all here because we have our own BECAUSE why we're here. And as long as something doesn't happen that would give that BECAUSE to the average Joe, Lemmy would remain a niche product.

That's not a sign that there's anything wrong with Lemmy, It's just the reality of how the Market works.

don't attract individuals, attract entire groups of people. The idea of moving humans one by one when all of their friends are on centralized platforms will only attract lonely people, who won't be able to promote the platform. The growth will eventually halt.

Move entire communities that are already connected: specific identities, followers of famous people (which should be onboard with the plan), specific subreddits and so on.

My wife checks it out about once a year because she likes the idea. Her measuring stick is when you can get a decent feed by subscribing to communities instead of needing to browse by all

cat pictures

recurring topics. My answer won't change:

• More quality content/comments. People will go where they find what they're looking for. No matter teh sad show reddit has turned into it is still filled with quality content (even more so in 'niche' communities).
• Less preaching. Does anyone really think that by telling people they're doing it wrong or worse that they're being dumb (because they're using this or that) we will encourage them to change their habits?
• Less politics. My very first impression of Lemmy was almost enough to make delete my account. Politics, not the most subtle one, and memes were everywhere. Not really the type of content I was looking for (I'm fine discussing politics with anyone willing to discuss it provided we can go above the mere 'you're wrong because I don't agree with you' or the 'you're fascist if you don't hate what I hate' type of discussion).
  Everyone should be able to chose what they're exposed to (including politics and memes, btw) but forcing them to taste it out of the box may not be the... most seducing default.

1. When mass migrations or issues happen(provided that the people coming are decent), be ready to share lemmy as an alternative?

Me and many others got to know about lemmy during the reddit API restriction and protests. I do remember stumbling upon mander.xyz before that, but I think I did not stick around much and forgot that account.
Recently, saw some others talk about lemmy when the Deprogram sub was banned.

2. Niche communities and useful information, as you already mentioned

Which are the good ways to search on lemmy. I remember reddit got popular due to being searched for tech issues and media recommendations.

Having the similar things here and them being available on search results would be good.

Well I have a lot of friends that used to use reddit but left for various reasons. I've been trying to get them to come here with promises that's it's like reddit 10 years ago.

But I think they are just kind of over it. Spend their time on other things.

Do not force people to do it. It should be based on personal interest.

Send them dank memes on Lemmy

The platforms will push them towards us.

But to answer your question, my uneducated guess would be to setup "default instances" so people can join lemmy and check out the place and eventually find a instance that best reflects their values.

Transferable accounts between instances as well. So tired of making new accounts everywhere I go

At this point in time, let them see what it's like and if they join, great. If not, no biggie. The fediverse is not depending on user growth like any of the corporate platforms. And it is hindered by people having to learn to be their own algorithm.

Yes, it would be nicer to increase the ranks in certain Lemmies or on Mastodon. But I haven't felt it's tumbleweeds in any of my feeds lately - this may be very subjective. And I feel reddit or the Melon are doing a lot of the convincing for us at the same time.

Make Lemmy better and easier to join/access/use. This is the only way.

I'm surprised NSFW comms haven't done this already. Idk tbh

A lot of people are against it because they see it as the first step towards evil, but I still think we should have some sort of recommendation algorithm. New content discovery on Lemmy is way too manual for normies like me.

The sign-up process should be streamlined. It's really intimidating to have to choose an instance when you don't even understand what the heck that is. And then there's the manual account validation. I'm not sure what the solution is but we might want to find one.

And we need to do something about the extremists. They have a right to exist, but the abnormally high prevalence of American-coded communist/anarcho-communist content that just casually talks about executing the rich and the like is weird and intimidating even to me, a decidedly left-wing person. Americans, who are famously doubtful of communism, probably run away from the platform seeing that. And as for non-Americans... Well the proportion of content that's specifically about American politics is even higher than on Reddit, which is saying something.