Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase.
Regardless? No, I’d say figuring out the reason is pretty important before any plans are moved on.
Luckily, there’s more than enough talk about Lemmy both here and on Reddit that you can read to give you an understanding of why exactly Lemmy isn’t growing. And I don’t believe appealing to Mastodon users is addressing the most pertinent of them: from the perspective of reddit users that aren’t already here, this place is a confusing mess filled with bickering instances, empty communities, and no content, all of which is much more complicated to access than the idea of lemmy that was initially sold to them.
They don’t want to think about instances or federation or admin squabbles. They just want a social network like reddit. Whether or not they want centralization, they at least want the outward appearance and usability of one. If you’re telling them they have to set up more than 1 account on different instances, you’ve already lost them.
I don’t know how, maybe a front end or an app or something, but somehow this all has to be simplified and unified dramatically to get most of their attention. There especially needs to be a way for users to see everything they want to see in one place, regardless of which instance they’re on and the mentality of its admins.
I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Are you going to host them? You can maybe get people to volunteer as mods but this notion of “every topic is its own instance” is entirely dependant on there being one person for each individual community being willing to host an instance and maintain it themselves, in perpetuity.
But the vast majority of people have neither the knowledge, time, resources, or desire to do this. And even if they did, there’s no guarantee that person has the mentality to admin an instance. The last thing we need is finding the one person that’s willing to host an instance for some niche interest turning out to be a complete asshole and ruining the place.
Think about how many reddit head mods just fucked off for months at a time. What happens when an instance admin does that?
But more importantly, what are you going to draw them here with? Why would they bother? What’s the sales pitch? What do they gain?