I also think instances just need to have more sane urls. It sounds silly but like it or not branding does matter. Instances like beehaw and sh.itjust.works just rub me the wrong way during first impressions. Even some of my friends who I've tried to introduce to Lemmy are just like..."what the fuck kinda website are you making me go to?" I am not surprised that lemmy.world is big, partly because the URL actually sounds official.

We also need super-communities that pull in content from multiple communities/instances, better multi-instance search, and a way to migrate between instances before the masses will be okay with smaller instances.