The more people see the engagement, the more chance of them asking “what is that?” It won’t be long until the apps are better, and links to articles could be less likely to get suppressed than migration memes.
I can only speak for myself, but I only saw Mastodon as viable after I started being exposed to the content there…
I’ve been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I’m coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching – you cannot tell people things like “you should just join lemmy/kbin” – you have to wait for them to ask “how do I join lemmy/kbin?”
That’s okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be “here’s what you’re missing”, positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.
It’s an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn’t gaslight people), but they’re also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.
How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?
Consider focusing on the positive – link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don’t need an account to read and enjoy.
Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread – that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They’ll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what’s going on.
And now they’ve convinced themselves it’s worth joining…