The best thing I could think of to promote Lemmy is promote it places where people are interested in FOSS. Mastodon, 4chan/g/, etc.

As much as I agree, it was reddit going mainstream that brought all the bots and trolls and psyops and marketers and ai scrapers. Lemmy staying a low profile but active minority of social media will keep it truer and less attractive to manipulators in my opinion.

Reddit was great back when the normies were on Facebook, Facebook was great when the Normie's were all scattered across MySpace, digg, tumbler, etc or just plainly not online yet.

Lemmy is great right now, I don't want it to be mainstream, and when it does I'll know to start looking elsewhere or at least to an instance that's defederated from the mainstream network