The thing I enjoy about Lemmy is that you can join an instance and if you don't agree with the policies and the people there you can join a different instance.
Having more users isn't going to help if the core developers are anti-diversity.
Which is fine, write code, live by your beliefs, but enforcing them in software on other people who might implement it is what I have a problem with.
Open source and federated platforms like lemmy will not magically fix the problem( * ). But they come with two killer advantages: 1) They are open, transparent and evolvable, hence diverse people can work on solutions and 2) Don't have private data monetization as their defining business model which frees up potential to explore less antisocial possibilities.
These "big picture" aspects will take some time to play out in full. But if you have the time there is nothing preventing you from setting up an instance that would strike the right balance (pun) and create history :-)
( * ) What would a "fix" look like? well thats not a easy question to get consensus on, but a workable definition is that at least people do not behave worse than in real life (as in person-to-person contact if you remember what that is :-)
I just wish, we could have a platform that was; not necessarily politically neutral, but where it didn't consume so much of the site.
Unfortunately when I visit Lemmy, I'm fronted with a lemmygrad.ml, and a "leftist" privacy focused one, which seem to be the only populated instances at the moment. So it doesn't inspire much hope.