When thinking about the problem of how to make Lemmy and the Fedi a rich source of content and engagement, I think about the early social web in around 2008/09, about Tumblr, specifically.
Tumblr came later to the party, after the first wave of Web2.0 tools (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Wordpress, Blogger, and the like) had staked out major market share and become the default tool in its specific niche use case. Rather than competing with those tools head on, Tumblr marketed itself as a "tumble-log" -- a place to pull together feeds from all your other disparate social presences into one coherent feed that could serve as a personal home page feed. Even though it was functionally just a blog, it was a blog designed to make it extremely easy to pipe in content from your other social presences and curate a personal stream that represents you -- AND a place where you could follow your friends and other interesting sources of content (news, brands, personalities) from multiple diverse streams of content -- images, microblog updates, articles, videos, etc.
Of course those other sources of content have gradually limited sharing outside their walled gardens, and Tumblr eventually developed its own distinct culture and identity from others in the space and fostered more native content of its own that sustained it all these years later.
The initial seed, though, its first growth trajectory, was powered by piping in as much content from other sources so there's something to look at when you get here.
I think we should be thinking about reducing friction around getting content from other sources into the Fedi where people can read and respond to it. Make it dead simple for people to pipe in their own content (blog posts, photo feeds, microblog updates) as well as actively invest in content re-post bots from major (and minor) news sources that people and communities can subscribe to and engage around. Communities can choose how they curate those feeds, but ignoring them risks stagnation of the reading experience.
