Lastly, I'm also not a big proponent of "ads" in the term where we have Hive logo's, magazines and fliers going out to try and get regular people to use Hive.

Full agree here. This is 'low hanging fruit' mass marketing thinking that did good in the 60–70s when people were still getting used to ads. The modern consumer has learned to tune this stuff out. It's only effective through brute force and overwhelming saturation.

Starting this month I'll be spending some time on researching 'Hive PR' strategies. In a nutshell:

1. Discovering, exploring, cataloguing different web3 or web3-adjacent channels or journalists. Ranking and assessing their costs, interests, and accessibility for submitting stories.
2. Hunting for good Hive stories—things that aren't just NFT launches or project plugs, but the real human connections and value derived from interacting with Hive.
3. Converting these stories into "snippets" that can be used by anyone to help tell the story (publishing them publicly here on chain too)
4. Finding matches between channels (#1) and stories (#2-3) and seeing if we can get meaningful Hive stories in front of the right audiences.

@rubencress did a great job of layering the marketing lingo on top of the community idea proposed in the OP: develop a niche strategy of connecting Hive's USP to web3 communities that could use a solid social system. Make sure to educate incoming users on the ease of swapping in ETH or MATIC or whatever their "mainstream" chain is.

Anywho—as part of my Step 1 above, I can certainly spend some time flagging any Gods Unchained-esque communities I come across. Also happy to help with comms, messaging, or strategy development around positioning Hive's USP.