How did Lemmy devs solve this?

When the devs released an update that allowed Lemmy to communicate properly with Mastodon and Friendica, a lot of the echo-chamber effect disappeared. But the dominance of larger instances kept up, sure anybody could find a smaller instance or even spin up their own and be auto-featured on join-lemmy.org - But with practically everybody subscribing and posting to existing and established communities it was hard to challenge the monopoly and get a foot in the door.

I've seen instances with hundreds of posts relegated to irrelevance, no upvotes, no comments. Because they weren't able to get the word out so people could have a choice to subscribe. Because they were blocked from the big announcement forums.

The only way to find them was to use the lemmy landing page and manually browse all instances to hunt down interesting subs. If I'm blocked from posting on the "new forums" section of lemmy.world, how would you ever know about my new forum? It would be dead in the water.

Or did they even?

Wider federation with Friendica/Mastodon++ was always planned. The reddit influx is by chance. I feel that the things that have changed the wider lemmy culture for the better have been by chance or as a by-product. Not by design.

And that's why I believed, and still belive, the Lemmyverse needed some externally driven changes. You have no idea the difference between now and 6-12 month ago. Being able to just post somewhere without being afraid of a misinterpreted comment could communaly block hundred of fellow instance users from a majority of the total lemmyverse content has been... Illuminating on the plights of people living in totalitarian states.