My read was 'we need to make more communities, AND we need more users' and I'm not sure why more communities solves anything since I've shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they're all like 'but why? there's nothing there.'

Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you'll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that's just a misleading and confusing presentation which they're taking the wrong impression away from.

I don't think there's a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it's not just another "reddit killer" with lots of empty zones of nothingness.