I think the big question here is still where we land. It could easily be somewhere in the 20-30k range.

Love this idea. I think we should also make sure that we are keeping broader fediverse compatibility in mind. Particularly kbin and mastodon.

Some interest specific instances that I haven’t seen here so far:
slrpnk.net
fanaticus.social
mander.xyz

There’s also a brand new currently unfederated instance for legal professionals at links.esq.social

The way I see it there are 2 paths forward for Lemmy. Without at least one of these scenarios occuring it seems unlikely that we’ll get back to a level of natural growth.

1. Reddit starts fucking up again. If this happens it’ll probably be because of or sometime around the IPO so be on the lookout for that.
2. We start getting significant user growth from other fediverse platforms, likely Mastodon. These users already understand how federation works and are actively looking for a lot of the features that Lemmy has to offer on their existing platforms. I think the way to get there is primarily through topic dedicated instances springing up as professional groups find Mastodon does not truly fit their needs. One recent example of this is links.esq.social which is a brand new currently unfederated instance for lawyers and legal professionals.

Last I heard Lemmy devs are explicitly against this. Mastodon users can still make top level posts over here but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.

As an example. This is the sort of post I’m talking about: https://tech.lgbt/@spaduf/110941439731236455

@bookstodon Not sure if this is anybody’s cup of tea but there’s a new Lemmy instance dedicated to books and writing over at: https://literature.cafe

The best part is you can participate from your existing fediverse account. Communities on Lemmy can be followed like users and have similar functionality to a.gup.pe groups!

Try following @fiction as an example but remember that federation doesn’t backfill.

More communities can be found here: https://literature.cafe/communities

Already sitting at about 8 boosts and several favorites from some folks with a fairly large follower count. That means potentially thousands of eyes. I went ahead and put together a dedicated user as I think that may be more appropriate than spam posting Lemmy communities/instances on my personal account. Not sure when I’ll have time to flesh it out and make it active but I’ve already got a list of communities/instances and what groups I think would be interested in them. Find it here:
https://mastodon.social/@lemmy_for_mastodon

The Lemmy devs honestly probably need a significant change in priorities or even a fork. They also seem to be ignoring relatively simple performance fixes that would have huge effects on the cost of instance hosting. If you think about it 60k users really shouldn’t cost that much to host. See @RoundSparrow’s thread about it here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2971578

What’s the alternative? It honestly seems like a worthwhile way to do it for me. I really think there’s only value in following niche communities from Mastodon. Discourse like that found on politics and news is pretty plentiful (and often higher quality) on Mastodon as is, but the gardening communities make up an important part of my Mastodon feed.