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
Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.
An average user doesn't really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.
As an example; I'm not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they're trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it's not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP's, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.
With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that's all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they'll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it's complicated.