Like many here I share concerns that as people migrate to Lemmy, they will gravitate towards the larger communities. In my opinion, the best way to curb this issue is by appealing to people's sense of local community.
To me regionality is a natural way to structure/organize instances. Rather than joining a random, or the most popular, instance I think people would be much more willing to join local instances, because it's something easily identifiable for them. These regional instances can of course have their genericlocal community, just like the regional city/state/country subreddits, but also have their own local interest communities. Even when there is community overlap with large generic/global communities, there is still a distinction with the regional community being geared towards local information and content.
Shouldn't be too hard to promote this. Lemmy just needs to encourage regional instances. Then in the join Lemmy page push people to the regional instances.
Maybe I'm off base though, and the main interest/draw to Lemmy is the fact that there is no structure? What does everyone think?