Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com asking people which community there were missing.
I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can’t be filled until we reach a higher population.
There is still maybe some potential improvement about some less well-known community that other people are interested in and that could some additional activity.
I try to help to make less known communities known with the regular threads on !newcommunities@lemmy.world (now moving to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.
One example is !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.
Similar with !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, or !showsandmovies@lemm.ee. I posted a thread about Ted Lasso a few days ago, it got some nice comments, but probably not enough to have a full fledged dedicated community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule influences this heavily imo
I think it’s both. On latin for example i have 120 users (35 are lemmy federate bots) but i’m the only one posting there, despite some posts getting a lot of upvotes or comments.
This can heavily discourage mods and force them to quit which kills the community.
I’m coming up on 1,000 subscribers, 500 posts, and 1.5+yrs of content creation in my bandes dessinées sublemmy, with myself being responsible for maybe 85-90% of total content creation. Your concerns are real and valid IMO.
Soon I plan to set up a bot to post small, ‘drip-like’ content every other day, supplementing the off-days with my beefier content, which are generally small reviews and content roundups. I guess my point is that it’s good to keep trying different techniques out, asking this and other communities for ideas, and having requisite patience.
Also, I think light-handed advertising across various platforms probably helps. Imgur and Reddit have worked okay so far, but frankly I need someone to help with other social media joints. That’s something an active mod could potentially help with…