Even before the performance degredation, it was recommended to use shota.nu for file uploads since it “saves us storage and will result in less upload failures because the built-in Lemmy uploader sucks” (from the Burggit tip).
I’m not sure if the concerns of the “ghost town” in the original post can be resolved by having non-registered viewers see a bunch of NSFW posts.
99% of the posts here are NSFW (I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t an exaggeration), so someone visiting the site for the first time would only see the other 1%. Given how few of SFW posts there are and how they don’t tend to have much interaction beyond the occasional comment or two, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to assume that this place is pretty much dead. By showing NSFW posts by default, new users would get an accurate measure of how active it is here and would be more likely to stay (and (hopefully) less of them would be scared off by extreme content than would leave due to lack of content).
Honestly, I’m not sure why the NSFW Lemmy UI removes the blur and auto-expands posts in the first place (though the option to automatically do this is appreciated). Reverting these is a no-brainer IMO, and it would bring the experience in line with vanilla Lemmy after creating an account (and enabling NSFW posts).
Kbin can federate with more software than lemmy, so there are more places to reach out to. Lemmy can pretty much only federate with other lemmy instances (or at the very least, it’s not very good at federating with non-lemmy instances). Based on what I’ve heard, kbin should also provide a better experince when federating with mastodon, pleroma, etc. since its UI’s more suited to it, but I haven’t used it for more than a few minutes.
I think the best way to get more users is to get more of the existing users to post (more) stuff. People aren’t going to pay much attention to a smaller instance like this if it doesn’t seem active (especially with all the defederation), and even just getting more of the current userbase to be more active would help with the “ghost town” feeling. Maybe we could have an Introductions community or weekly pinned https://burggit.moe/c/discussions thread or something. More community variety would probably also help, even if it’s just porn (at least it’d give people more of a reason to be here). I wonder, how many people are fine with loli (or any specific genre of porn) but aren’t really into it?