Thanks for stepping up! I took over modding for a large and potentially contentious subject matter, so I relate to jumping in head first with establishing some rules. I actually first out up a mod post asking for what the community wanted out of the space, then another mod on the team compiled the responses. Our team is now debating with more nuance the presentation of those community rules, but it was very important to me that the rules were co-created by the community and the mods.
Anyway, all that to say welcome and thanks for stepping up.
I see you have a plan for pulling in from Mastadon, which I'm both fairly ignorant of and also not interested in using because Twitter-like formats seem to me to be a place to disseminate information to a wide opt-in audience whereas forum structures (like threads in kbin/Lemmy) seem to be where dialogue and community building can happen.
You sound a lot more experienced about the Fediverse than I feel. Can you speak to any vision you have about getting higher user engagement for this community in the threads (not microblog)? My m/sub feed already doesn't even show the craft communities I'm subscribed to for whatever reason - I've assumed because of trickling thread/photo/link submissions.