I talk a lot about Lemmy with friend and family, and I cross post Lemmy posts to Reddit (in fact, that’s the only thing I do on Reddit).

You make a very good point. I myself have noticed sites like Lemmy.world are a bit of a ghost town compared to other forums. I think the main reason is that sites like Reddit are still more popular. And that's either because people started using Reddit when it was actually good and are clinging to nostalgia, or because people don't know that Lemmy exists. Or both. I recently saw a post on Reddit where someone claimed that Reddit is the only usable forum on the internet.

To answer your question: Convince people that Lemmy is what Reddit was trying to be back in 2006.

Don't.

I don't think that the current structure is set up for growth. The devs have stated that they don't see preparing for growth as a priority and we haven't seen the kind of mod tools needed for a larger audience.

I also don't see an onboarding process that has been created to explain to new users how a Federated Lemmy is different from Reddit.

Post good content, post links to that content to people it would be desirable to have on here. Have enough other good content that they are inclined to stay.

For profit services don't need to die. Let the influencer morons stay on them so the rest of us don't have to deal with them and their idiot followers enshittifying another platform.

I only came here when Reddit banned me, even though I knew about it for ages before that.

So we should get more people on Reddit to threaten violence against Nazis.

Bring it up at your local town hall; be sincere about what Lemmy is. Ask if there are any Reddit users then publicly shame them for using the platform.

Lemmy is sort of crappy through its software decisions, similar to how Reddit is crappy but in some ways worse. There's not much we can do about that as users. Reddit also manages to paper over some of its crappiness through moderator interventions, while Lemmy tends to let crap slide. Crappiness = clickbait titles with no indication of what the link is about, lots of duplicate posts, etc. Lemmy adds the problem of fragmenting communities across instances. I think I heard that posts duplicated across multiple communities in a single instances will somehow be cleaned up in 1.0, which can help.

Anyway there's not a whole lot that users can do, except maybe launch some new instances or forks that don't suck as much.