I think you have a better chance if your instance focuses on a topic instead of being general purpose. That's the reason I chose programming.dev. All communities there are related to programming so when I sort by "local" I see something interesting even though I haven't subscribed to that community. And that increases my interaction with those communities.

Be also careful with potential users being cautious about you going out of business overnight. Vlemmy.net members had that happen to them last week.

Honestly your best method is going to be to make a new thread like once a week, in one of the major Lemmy-focused forums, until your userbase hits a figure you like.

It's going to be more effective than any other method by far, I think, as you're most likely to catch people right at that point where they're thinking "I want to experience a smaller Instance..."

Then they're gonna make an alt there, and if they like it, the alt will become the main.

I just liked the name of sh.itjust.works tbh and the lemmy.world one was overloaded

I think that getting your instance in some of the lists going around would be a good idea, I have accounts on a few instances and most of them I have discovered through any of the lists listed on join-lemmy.org/instances

A big problem is that the awesome lemmy lost doesn't seem to be updated anymore

Going a little bit different direction than some of the other responses, I feel like hash-tagging (wait that's called something else now...?) content is important in helping people to find you in searching. And I'm thinking of search as a particularly important function as platforms like this are growing.

I see posts that are heavily (15 or more) tagged.... that may not even qualify as "heavily" out here in the fediverse, just something new to me.

Been thinking about this a little bit and how I can personally lean into it versus my own insecurities. So this is a way for me to exercise self-promotion.

Have some clarity around who you are, what you care about, why you’re doing this, the sort of things you want to achieve with the instance, what you want to prevent, what your values are especially around moderation etc.

Also having redundancies in place or at least someone else rubbing the insurance with you is attractive.

Good luck!!