Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.

To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That's why web search engines be created.

Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.

Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.

Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.

It's important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn't like reddit's widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is "a bunch of 14 year olds" with "vote bots" or a "political echo chamber", that's just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they're suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it's mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.

The best promotion is to be awesome.

>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y

Promote Mbin. The only bad thing it has going for it is that it cannot block entire instances, which is odd because one would think blocking domains would do this. It also has a number of pet peeves, but none I've found to be as bad.

Or just link to this: https://jointhefediverse.net/

Oh, yeah. It's still ongoing. You can track the progress at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha/routes.py if you like. At the bottom of that page, things with a 'Stage 1' are what's left to do.

The remaining stuff is mostly to do with chat / notifications. Once done, a basic app could be released, and then improved to include stuff that's missing (things like uploading an image to post or a comment, and viewing reports)

EDIT: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to another comment. Still getting the hang of NodeBB. Now will this edit work ...

Yep, lemmy definitely has a problem with too much politics.

I propose that no post should include the head or face of any politician. Seeing a politician typically ruins your day. Best to either keep politics abstract (memes) or not do that at all.

Unfortunately, everyone of your quoted feedback is spot on. Lemmy got the worst of reddit's political echo chamber combined with the "I am so smart" crowd. To make Lemmy barely tolerable, I've had to filter far too many words and block far too many communities. Most people aren't going to jump through hoops to make a platform usable.