What about in reverse?
Give a small amount of reward for people to use the service which undoubtedly would gain you uptake.
Personally I think this is too little too late. Steemit needed this before communities or with the launch of communities. So many have left since those days and I would imagine 'lack of social engagement' is high on reasons why.
So if I was a developer here I would most definitely be creating an incentive for people that contribute to engagement to be rewarded incrementally. I would actually be further developing it as a 'mobile Blockchain portal' to Hive and to the world of Blockchain in general. To cater not just to the audience of Hive but the many that do all their chat on discord and other chat clients outside of Blockchains but are essentially 'Blockchain People'. That's a niche which would definitely find a 'crypto chat client' enticing and something that would give Hive and devs on this Blockchain clout.
That's what is missing in this so called "web 3.0" .. ACTUAL SOCIAL tools and engagement. That's why mainstream doesn't care much for what is provided here. When people start to take this seriously and develop for that audience, then, AND ONLY THEN will you get user growth.
At its core BeeChat is not a user facing service, it is built to help other Hive developers and service administrators to integrate a communication feature in their apps if there is a need.
For example, in NFT Showroom and similar Hive based websites we are building, we needed a simple chat service where buyers and sellers can communicate without hopping into another app, so we have decided to decouple the chat module and release it for everyone other websites we might need this.
Yeah I see. So it's not able to exist outside of the Hive system?
That's crazy that it wasn't until NFTshowroom came into existence that developers got that light bulb thought "we need chat." I remember when I joined steemit and realized that to chat to people one needed another service to do it outside of the system so I automatically concluded that blockchain was nowhere near a product ready for market. 3 years on, that assessment hasn't really changed.
I'm not critiquing you personally but what I find foolish here is that people want to onboard masses (hoping token price will benefit) but don't at all want to discuss that the product is too basic. Expecting people to leave the "evil mainstream platforms" without actually having a better service is just never going to be a reality.