Things we have no interest in changing. The topics of the most popular threads (linux, privacy, open source, niche diy, programming), the makeup of the communities (occupation, gender, political alignment, etc.), non-mainstream opinions (privacy, dangers of AI, how to best spend one's time).

Lemmy will never grow as it stands. The public won't change and neither will we. Our best shot is to pitch it to somewhat technically minded folks while could operate an instance if it is set up for them. Most of us could do this pretty easily with Ansible.

The harder part is the pitch. ESPECIALLY when persuading someone to manage an instance, we need to lighten any of the opinions in the first paragraph. Something we don't historically do very well.

We also need to make things more "fun/useful". Sports trivia, more cat/animal memes, substantially less cynical comics/more "funny ones", more mainstream hobby communities (e.g. cooking, rock climbing, active D&D), random/communities with no "real purpose", communities for differently abled/neurodivergent folks with a large enough user base to provide real support.

Creature comforts. A lot of people are going to find Lemmy to be primative. Something we take for granted is we will happily embrace something "inferior" but belonging to us rather than the bleeding edge proprietary offerings. I've come to find I "love" my freedom oriented software and hardware to the point I don't even care if it shits the bed. It's like my puppy. Sure it will do things I don't like, but I'm patient with it. Most normies won't feel that way. We'd need to polish and grow the code base to include the things people expect in a modern app, but most of us don't have the skill or the time. And these additions may be things we don't want anyway

I don't see this as insurmountable. Less so as folks are becoming more aware of the invasive nature of AI. We just need to balance that et. al with the above.