Ooh you’ve got your work cut out for you over there! Looks like you have a solid team though, and totally agree it’s best to tackle these things head-on. Best of luck, and respect for taking it on.
I think there’s maybe a bit of a Lemmy/Kbin misunderstanding going on there with the Mastodon thing. On Kbin I believe magazines have a separate “microblog” tab where Mastodon toots are automatically pulled in? We don’t have anything like that on Lemmy. But Mastodon users can make normal posts and comments in Lemmy communities, so I was basically just giving a heads up that you’ll see me around under two similar names.
As far as vision goes. I think the Threadiverse in general is in a bit of a precarious spot at the moment. So many people set up communities and magazines, were active moderators for a week or two, and then left. And when they left and stopped actively encouraging discussion in their communities, engagement naturally dropped. Now we have a wave of people like you and me attempting to pick up the pieces, which in some spaces is going to work and in others I imagine it’ll already be too late.
That said, while I come armed to the teeth with discussion prompts and a bullet-point list of ideas in general to reverse that process, growth for the sake of growth shouldn’t ever be the goal especially for a community based around something naturally slower paced like knitting. The last thing we want is people feeling pressured to make more things to post, in a hobby that just naturally takes a lot of time.
The issue with the feed algorithm is also a problem for us on Lemmy, I know our devs have a number of discussions going on about how best to surface posts from the smaller communities we’re subscribed to so I expect Ernest is having those exact same discussions on your side too. Given the rate of change in both of our platforms, I’m hopeful that issue gets the attention it deserves soon!