I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
As much I love the idea of Lemmy, I've noticed myself I was drawn back to Reddit. Why? Because it has a larger community, of course, but (and please don't shoot me for this), Reddit's algo and rewards. Yes, the achievements gallery is stupid, but it works.
The folks building Lemmy investigating how to increase engagement, this is one factor.
Niche active communities for sure.
I am also banned from reddit and can't contribute. You'd imagine that would pull me more towards lemmy, but just getting the novelty of so many new posts makes it enticing even if I am not interacting.
Instagram and tiktok benefit less from its algo imo than they do from its numerous creators. The novelty drives people. It's complicated I am sure but actively this is what I think about when I reach for these platforms.
I definitely think the trick is having innumerable amount of content.
in fact i have been asking for a better Lemmy content recommendation system here