Thank you for this post and encouragement. I am open to volunteering my time and talents to help people find Lemmy.

However, after the work is done, it would be fantastic if you all could invest in advertising. I know that Google and Bing aren’t great but if I had to guess, search trend for “reddit alternatives” is probably rising and Lemmy is in a great spot to provide reddit refuges a life raft.

I would call them “starter” instances. And I’m in agreement there should be a set of principles that these instances should follow but at the same time telling new users that it’s okay to switch instances. I started in .world but moved due to their increasingly conservative changes.

While I personally would steer new users away from .world, I think it’s more important to tell them it’s okay to switch instances.

I’m in the same boat. The ads have become terrible for me so I’m in the market for a new app anyway. I was hesitant to purchase a subscription because of the low number of releases.

Glad I didn’t

I personally see three big issues with getting new users to Lemmy use and stat on Lemmy:

• knowing about it: It is a matter of time before Reddit bans linking to Lemmy. Either by outright preventing their discussion via shadow deletes or full deletes. join-lemmy.org would be well served by purchasing ads on Google and on Bing
• join-lemmy ux needs to be improved: this goes to your point and I fully agree that there needs to be a better onboarding experience. I am a fairly technical guy and even I had trouble understanding the major concepts behind Lemmy. Many of these concepts aren’t terribly important to a new user though. At least at first.
• more and better content: this is fortunately getting better but we’re not there yet

Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.

Though that said I haven’t heard much about defederating in some time.