Finally had some space to reply!

Re: Why now

• First, I feel like we're still at a very dangerous point, where if this place gets quiet for a few days, or some dumb thing happens (like minor drama), or 2-3 regular commenters quit the site, enough people may drift away that the site can go into a death spiral and not recover. We're much safer than we were a week ago. But we are not safe yet. I have a very strong instinct about this: building a community is like kindling a fire. It's easy to keep a strong fire burning. Users get a lot of value from a big site (e.g. people are hating reddit but still visit). But a small flame goes out in one small gust. The more users we have, the more wind resistant we will be.
• Second, I feel we need to get in the habit / practice of having regular user inflows from larger channels. I feel that passive word-of-mouth growth is not trustworthy for sustaining us over longer periods, and I would like the site to be larger to avoid a death spiral. And the sooner we do it, the better for us. More users means more content, means funner site! And sure the site's a little undercooked now, but it's always going to be undercooked in some ways... and more importantly, the people who join at the early promo waves are the type of people we need anyway. Research in marketing has shown that (1) early adopters are okay with things being janky (they prioritise novelty more), and (2) it takes 1-2 dozen exposures to a product or service before mainstream users will give it a try. So the users we get in early promotion waves will be the right ones!
• I agree that the site seems to be starting to show signs of growth though via our passive flows! The main numbers I am watching are the daily active users count + daily thread comment counts, and these have been sitting very still until just recently. That's the thing that was giving me concern. (Like, if we are seeing new names pop up, and the daily actives aren't going up, that means we're churning users quite hard...)

Re: !Malaysia

• I agree that this is not ideal given we have so many other overlapping subs. I tried crossposting and that sucked, it creates a whole new and separate empty comments section.
• But I still strongly believe that we should have a country-level "subreddit replacement". Without this, there is no obvious flagship country community for Malaysia who come to the Lemmyverse via other channels than r/Malaysia. We're doing our country a disservice by not having this; I'm willing to do a little legwork to fix this issue.
• I'm looking into ways to work around this. There may be a technical solution. Maybe we can create a "virtual" community, which aggregates the feeds of a few real subs. Or less good, maybe we can relocate !news. Country-level subs have different characters on reddit, and some countries do pure news subs. It's not necessarily wrong. E.g. r/Australia is very news heavy, most of the more cosy stuff happens in state or city-level subs.