I think the goal should be slow continuous growth. It’s a social media tool and that requires enough engaged users so it doesn’t feel dead. As you pointed out, we’re not there yet. I also think a huge jump in new users would be detrimental. Without central leadership of traffic and hardware Lemmy requires longer to respond to changes in user load. Nothing would be more detrimental to adding long term engaged users than an influx of new users that caused infrastructure overloading.

We’re very spoiled with reliability these days. People are not interested in unreliable access to their doom scrolling (myself included, unfortunately).

Hard to tell if this is a proposal to fight over hardware or an offer for free stuff.

I choose to believe the former because it makes me chuckle more.

Personally I think the biggest hurdle will be moderation and defederation as it pertains to the first amendment. I believe there was already a supreme Court case where blocking a user on Twitter (from an official govt account) was deemed unconstitutional. This precedent might mean a govt instance is not allowed to defederate with any other server unless they defederate with all(?) This is pure speculation on my part, but I can guarantee it would go to the courts.