Fedigrow

1. Just like default theming, I think it suffers from a problem of "it works for me [the developer] so who cares." Community discovery could be so much better. As far as I know, PieFed is the only project that's actually looking at it from first principles instead of "here's a totally useless "trending" box, we good right?"
2. To me, the root cause analysis is that the nature of Lemmy's design makes it tough to customize. You can't have a custom sort order. You can't (easily) have an admin change what the "trending" box is based on, or whether it exists at all. I think it leaves things in a weird state where a handful of Lemmy developers have to do everything, instead of needing to focus on a core set of robust functionality and letting a little ecosystem develop of customizations and tweaks with a tight feedback loop between developers, admins, and users.
3. It honestly could be as simple as a box that assembles the last five posts from !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communities@ponder.cat. Do something. I think it would honestly be super motivating if someone posted to !newcommunities and then saw their community start to show up in the box. You'd need to moderate some spam of course.
4. I actually don't think the "please federate my community everywhere" tools are as necessary as they seem like they would be. I've always seen from even a single post to one of the promo communities, it seems like the community pretty much goes everywhere.
5. I think a lot of the "niche communities go quiet" problem could be solved with better interoperation with Mastodon. It's fine if only 3 people on Lemmy talk about JRPGs, if they can talk to a whole community external to Lemmy about it, on Lemmy. That was the whole point of ActivityPub, but unfortunately ActivityPub isn't all that well-designed, so it's a lot harder to make happen than it should be.

Those are my thoughts, in no particular order.