Going in with the aim of making Lemmy “more popular” is not the best approach. There are going to be surges of people signing up for new accounts, trying it out a bit, then leaving, especially when Reddit does something major in its poisoning of well. But the goal shouldn’t be to try to keep everyone who ever creates a Lemmy account.

The best thing to do is build the communities here that you are interested in. Do what you can to make them lively and active. This, combined with client improvements from Lemmy developers, will lead to steady growth and more community participation.

People have gotten used to centralization. With most current social media, you download one app, create an account, and start following. So when people try, say, Mastodon, they expect it to be a Twitter clone. Then they have to deal with things like instances and 8t goes counter to their expectations.

I think that over time, development of more beginner-friendly clients will smooth out the expectation vs reality disconnect newcomers experience, as the advantages of decentralization become clear.