I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
The primary problem here is that because lemmy.world isn't visible, the instance picker when organised by activity determines lemmy.ml to be the most popular instance and then not far-off, hexbear. That's not good long-term if people are shepherded into those instances without really knowing their context.
Right, that's why I suggest providing both an opinionated option and an opinionated option. Like a "recommended" section and a "full list" section.
Let people without contest and who don't care to learn the context in advance use an opinionated picker, but don't withhold from people who want to dig in.
But it turns out I misunderstood the example that was given - those instances aren't shown because they simply aren't piefed instances.