I self-hosted an instance a when I got here a few days ago. The server costs me the same whether I use it or not, so I’d like to let as many people sign up as I can. I had a few people sign up already before join-lemmy.org was changed to require 5 monthly active users, but now my instance isn’t shown there because it’s below the limit.
Any idea on how to attract a dozen or so users so that I can show up on the main join-lemmy page again?
You’re going to have to get use to some shameless self promotion. I’ve been posting on all relevant communities here. Luckily so far people have been very open and welcoming, probably because we’re all trying to grow and cultivate our communities.
I suggest we start building up support communities. For example I have a pop music community. In my sidebar I reached out to the mod of an indie music community and asked if they wanted to link to each other’s communities in our sidebars, which they loved the idea of.