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
That's another good point.
PieFed has at least taken some steps to work on this, with it automatically posting new communities to NewCommunities and auto-subbing the instance to those posted there.
If the Lemmy devs stopped pushing ML propaganda, transphobia, and genocide denial and actually worked on the software, we might be in a better place today.
I have proposed piefed instances be able to opt into automatic federation with other selected instances when a community is made. I think it might work like that now via a toggle. Rimu would confirm.
Obviously smaller, personal instances would opt out of that but for general-use instances it makes sense.
Might be "Automatically add new remote communities" toggle on the admin side.