1000 percent, this is something I've been paying more and more attention to recently.
The reason why Blender is on a trajectory to very slowly take over the industry and Gimp isn't is because Blender has a community of non-coding artists who are on good terms with the dev team and who talk about the product, build tutorials, and generally make it accessible. The shift in how people thought about and talked about Blender is in no small part influenced by people throwing tutorials on Youtube saying "check out this cool thing I made in Blender, here's how you do it."
Similarly, the reason why Mastodon is eclipsing other Twitter competitors like BlueSky and why it's more successful than arguably much better federated protocols like Matrix is because a bunch of non-coders showed up on Mastodon and turned it into a community (with all the good and bad that entailed).
I have so many issues with ActivityPub, it is not the protocol I would have preferred to win the federation debate. I don't want to badmouth Mastodon, it's a huge achievement and I would in no way do a better job building it -- but my point is Mastodon can have no concept of mobile identities or homeserver separation, and lack support for E2EE, and be lagging on moderation tools, and be arguably not fantastic about handling accidental DOS attacks on smaller instances, and it just does not matter at all, because they got a community to show up that likes them and that is enthusiastic and that helps with all the non-code stuff and actively goes out and evangelizes them and says "oh, join my instance, I'll show you how to set up filters and who to follow", and so... that's it, that ends up mattering more; because of that community involvement ActivityPub is now getting federation support from Wordpress and Threads.
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Getting actual adoption of Open Source products is about more than code. If someone is showing up on the Linux forums and helping randos solve tech problems, that person is contributing just as much as someone who writes code for the kernel. And not just contributing to the person you're replying to, you're also averting a distracting issue on a Github repo, you're making the community feel friendly, you're making someone on the fence think, "actually, I could give this Linux thing a try because if I get confused even if I feel like I'm being stupid somebody will jump in and be happy that I'm here and will try to help me". You're taking care of a support issue so that a moderator or another helper or an overworked community manager that has seen hundreds of identical comments no longer needs to worry about it.
It is a valuable contribution to help others use Free/Libre software, to write documentation, to be public about your usage of Open Source software and to talk about the things you make with it, to brainstorm ideas and give feedback on features, and even just to cheer on developers, donate money, and to get excited about releases and excited about the things they're doing.
Even the bikeshedding that happens on platforms like Mastodon -- while it's good to have tiered systems of feedback that shield developers from getting harassed by thoughtless ideas or suggestions, it also helps Mastodon a lot to have a community of people who are constantly thinking, "hey, we should do X, we should do Y, Z is an issue we need to address." Filtering that into useful feedback is just triaging.
Others have pointed out, just documentation alone is a huge boon for getting people to actually use software. But going beyond that, I feel like increasingly I can predict what the health of a project is going to be in a few years based just on, "is there an enthusiastic community of non-programmers who are participating in the development process?"
The reason why Blender is on a trajectory to very slowly take over the industry and Gimp isn't is because Blender has a community of non-coding artists who are on good terms with the dev team and who talk about the product, build tutorials, and generally make it accessible. The shift in how people thought about and talked about Blender is in no small part influenced by people throwing tutorials on Youtube saying "check out this cool thing I made in Blender, here's how you do it."
Similarly, the reason why Mastodon is eclipsing other Twitter competitors like BlueSky and why it's more successful than arguably much better federated protocols like Matrix is because a bunch of non-coders showed up on Mastodon and turned it into a community (with all the good and bad that entailed).
I have so many issues with ActivityPub, it is not the protocol I would have preferred to win the federation debate. I don't want to badmouth Mastodon, it's a huge achievement and I would in no way do a better job building it -- but my point is Mastodon can have no concept of mobile identities or homeserver separation, and lack support for E2EE, and be lagging on moderation tools, and be arguably not fantastic about handling accidental DOS attacks on smaller instances, and it just does not matter at all, because they got a community to show up that likes them and that is enthusiastic and that helps with all the non-code stuff and actively goes out and evangelizes them and says "oh, join my instance, I'll show you how to set up filters and who to follow", and so... that's it, that ends up mattering more; because of that community involvement ActivityPub is now getting federation support from Wordpress and Threads.
----
Getting actual adoption of Open Source products is about more than code. If someone is showing up on the Linux forums and helping randos solve tech problems, that person is contributing just as much as someone who writes code for the kernel. And not just contributing to the person you're replying to, you're also averting a distracting issue on a Github repo, you're making the community feel friendly, you're making someone on the fence think, "actually, I could give this Linux thing a try because if I get confused even if I feel like I'm being stupid somebody will jump in and be happy that I'm here and will try to help me". You're taking care of a support issue so that a moderator or another helper or an overworked community manager that has seen hundreds of identical comments no longer needs to worry about it.
It is a valuable contribution to help others use Free/Libre software, to write documentation, to be public about your usage of Open Source software and to talk about the things you make with it, to brainstorm ideas and give feedback on features, and even just to cheer on developers, donate money, and to get excited about releases and excited about the things they're doing.
Even the bikeshedding that happens on platforms like Mastodon -- while it's good to have tiered systems of feedback that shield developers from getting harassed by thoughtless ideas or suggestions, it also helps Mastodon a lot to have a community of people who are constantly thinking, "hey, we should do X, we should do Y, Z is an issue we need to address." Filtering that into useful feedback is just triaging.
Others have pointed out, just documentation alone is a huge boon for getting people to actually use software. But going beyond that, I feel like increasingly I can predict what the health of a project is going to be in a few years based just on, "is there an enthusiastic community of non-programmers who are participating in the development process?"