The best thing I could think of to promote Lemmy is promote it places where people are interested in FOSS. Mastodon, 4chan/g/, etc.
Lemy Meta
Main community of Lemy
As much as I agree, it was reddit going mainstream that brought all the bots and trolls and psyops and marketers and ai scrapers. Lemmy staying a low profile but active minority of social media will keep it truer and less attractive to manipulators in my opinion.
Reddit was great back when the normies were on Facebook, Facebook was great when the Normie's were all scattered across MySpace, digg, tumbler, etc or just plainly not online yet.
Lemmy is great right now, I don't want it to be mainstream, and when it does I'll know to start looking elsewhere or at least to an instance that's defederated from the mainstream network
It wasn't the volume of users, it was the greedy administration. Decentralization will help filter out the shit, so let's help convert the world off of the shit.
I made a little slide show commercial for our instance. I upload at the ending of the videos I make. Maybe someone could do something like that an use them as YouTube ads
The problem is most of us dont want to go back. To do it properly you have to use reddit normally and look for opportunities to boost shift things towards Lemmy. But that means using reddit which sucks and defeats the point.
WE MUST GO BACK. MAKE FAKE ACCOUNTS. WE MUST DEREDDIT REDDIT FOR THE SAKE OF LEMY