I agree - decentralized is the future. Fwiw, I'm really enjoying lemmy and want it to succeed. I'm just hoping to help somehow. I'd love for centralized social networks to become decentralized so that the perverse incentives that exist currently can evaporate.

I'm nervous posting this because I don't want to come off as telling you "what to do". This is coming more from a desire to support the awesome work you're doing to help lemmy grow on the fediverse. If this is too "forward" - I'm happy to back down and continue posting everything I've got to /c/earthporn, /c/photography, and /c/jeep. ;)

It seems in the short term, we're just trying to capture and retain users so that communities can grow and become new homes for reddit refugees.

• If the signup process is difficult or confusing, the "capture" part of that goal will be diminished.
• Small instances have kind of a "ghost town" feel. I understand why this is, but new users don't and this affects the "retention" part.

Some ideas:

• A getting started guide -- for example, creating an account on a new/small instance is different than a large instance because of how federation works. The information in the fediverse is largely available, but knowing how to find it is nuanced. Having a guide or video or something could help with this and support the "retention" goal.
• Having a few preferred instances to handle the surge of new users. This will take efforts from server admins (like yourself) to communicate to the community the needs they have so that we can provide support. This addresses both "capture" and "retain" goals really well in the short term. Some sort of strategy would be needed long term to "decentralize".
• I'm donating on patreon to lemmy.ml (just $10/month for now), but I wonder if other users realize that money is needed to handle the new load (for lemmy.ml, beehaw, etc). It seems reasonable to support the people that are crucial to making instances like this work without requiring them to take on enormous financial risk. (I'm saying this without understanding anything about your hosting solution or backend infrastructure, but assume that to scale, you need to pay Amazon/Microsoft/Google mo money).
• If you need help building out infrastructure, there are those of us here that would be willing to take some time to help as well - we just need a way to know what you need.
• Some kind of "invite" feature - it would let me send "invite" codes to my friends. This eliminates the "what instance should I use" question and potentially the "manual approval" process. This could potentially be used to create nefarious bot accounts, and may just need to exist initially (but not long term).