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
App dev can be outsource, but it really doesn't matter who run the hard coded instance. It could by. Sh.itjust.works. it would be an issue if the app took off and the instance wasn't ready for the influx.
Maybe it picks an instance at random to distribute the load.
My original idea in my head was that the app developer would run the instance that was hard coded