Absolutely! Growth is important and not every possible community is mirrored on the fediverse. But if anything this is all the more reason for interpersonal connections to drive new user growth. That will naturally help filter users to instances they align with. I’m considering going so far as to host an instance specifically for my geographical area to really lean into the idea of a “local” internet.
I’m going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.
I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.
The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.
Been using this for years, it’s good, but probably not for everyone. I like being able to manually sort the order of my folders, and it forces a maximum folder depth of like 3 or 4 depending on how you interpret one part. This makes it very quick to navigate, particularly from the command line. Add something like Zoxide on top and I can fly through all my notes and projects.