there has to be a critical mass of users and compelling content to keep them here.
The problem that I see is the limitation on the number of accounts that can be claimed. Right now the limit is 2295 accounts per day which amounts to 837,675 per year... that is not enough to reach any sort of critical mass.
I understand that in order to prevent a spamming attack on the network limitations are needed but this could also be achieved by allowing a much higher number of claimable accounts per day.
To prevent a spam attack we can just limit the operations allowed to new accounts to only power up a minimun of 3 steem. If the new accounts do not have the steem needed to power up then whoever is onboarding should pickup the slack by delegating resource credits.
I was not aware of that limitation. But if we could even get some active communities of a few thousand people then Steem would be more compelling. I see from the stats @penguinpablo produces that we have been gaining 2000 to 3000 accounts per week, so there is scope for fast more, but I'm not sure how many of those actually do anything. We need real active users.