My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:
- Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and "migrate"
- A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
- 15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the "politics" of each instance
- The "Community Ambassador" feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.
These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think "how can we get from 50k to 5 million?"