Before anything, I would check if there is an active community they are actually interested in, and give them that. Otherwise, there’s really not much reason why they should use it. It would be like gifting someone a box full of manga to someone who is not interested in Japanese stuff. I’m saying this because a lot of people including OP seems to think decentralisation/federation/FOSSness are some major selling points to a lot of people, but it really isn’t. Content usually is.

It even applies to you too. If an instance banned you for mentioning Linux or FOSS, you wouldn’t really care that they were running open-source Lemmy, you would ditch that instance. If that happened with every instance, you wouldn’t use Lemmy at all.

Now you made me think man!