I agree with you. Hive is an infrastructure more than a product or service. Therefore it's difficult to find a way to promote it directly and we should even stop these efforts to promote hive funded by dhf or value plan. As long as there is not a clear USP, there is not target public and therefore no reason to market.
I totally agree that the marketing has to come from the apps and the communities. But we would need to have the necessary tools to be independent, like an easy account creation tool funded with account creation tokens from the community or the app accounts. As long as such a tool is not in place, we need to fall back on the account creation instances that we have no control of.
In a way it sounds stupid if you promote your community and then you need to send them to a totally different website to create their account first...
RE: Why is Hive not growing?