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
That's a fairly perfect answer imho, ticking all the boxes: (1) choosing to see that content becomes opt-in, rather than have to opt-out, crucially the reason why being that they have failed to abide by the rules of the wider community, and even been caught outright lying to instance admins; and (2) explaining the reasoning behind it, and how to un-do that decision (which can always be reversed later).
Yes PieFed has a ton of features but I agree that it needs some work still on its level of polish, which Lemmy does ever-so-slightly better with, being older. Fwiw rimu@piefed.social has asked the community whether it desires more of the former vs. latter and typically the past answers have leaned towards more features (although I suspect the tide is beginning to turn on that based on posts submitted to !piefed_meta@piefed.social). I do think that PieFed will end up being the future and leave Lemmy behind (e.g. Jeena's story), though it would be even more ideal if they could both compete in offering fantastic utility as FOSS to everyone world-wide, in efforts to combat against enshittification of the internet!
I have recommended piefed.zip (and also lemmy.zip) in the past to people, but after you explained that I have zero reservations about it being labelled as "Newbie-friendly" and will recommend it all the more as the default go-to instance - with nothing against piefed.social obviously (I am on it myself!:-P) but as a bulwark against centralization I agree with @Blaze@piefed.zip that it would be most ideal to spread people around, which right now means more off of piefed.social.
Thank you for being a MAJOR part of the solution to advance the Threadiverse forward. I don't care that it's a week behind, I am so very glad that you responded here:-).
Minor note: the ToS in the instance chooser on piefed.social for Piefed.zip points to https://piefed.social/tos which says "not found". That is the instance chooser pointed to by https://join.piefed.social/ so even though piefed.zip has its own could be helpful to change for people thinking of joining.
Glad to hear