Few thoughts:

• Plenty of (valid) concern about niche communities in here. I do wonder if it is something lemmy can help with some features.
  • A Best sorting algorithm is in the works, which would rank posts by how popular/hot they are relative to their community, and might be a great way to surface interesting stuff from smaller communities
  • Some sort of "Multi-Communities" that can be created and defined by the user would be wonderful too, especially in combination with the Best sort. All the news communities in one feed, sorted equally, eg. Could really be quite powerful IMO.
• A controversial thought maybe ... would getting more mastodon people over in some way or another be a good way to increase user counts? They're already on the fediverse and understand something about federation. How to get them over is probably rather non-trivial though.
  • Some sort of "campaign" to let mastodon people know about lemmy/kbin. You'd be surprised how little mastodon users are aware of other platforms.
  • Very controversial and probably very difficult ... adding some sort of microblogging interface to lemmy so that a mastodon user would feel more at home migrating to a lemmy instance that allows them to stay plugged in to their microblogging space. At the moment, mastodon's UI is not doing a good job at allowing federation between lemmy and mastodon to be functional, and that's unlikely to change any time soon, so it may be up to lemmy to bring microbloggers to here so that they can participate in both kinds of formats.