There isn’t enough people on Lemmy to have niche communities finding someone interested in threads for example here is like finding a grain(Though niche communities like spec evo in for pages I own probably could take take off If I put enough effort into it) in the sand people will follow niche sub lemmings and they will upvote them because they like the idea of niche communities so they subscribe and they like the idea of niche posts so they comment even if they aren’t interested in the topic. It is hit and miss with mostly misses due to the random odds that the community will have enough people to join it that are willing to post or comment. That is not surprising for a site of 50,000 people(though some niche Lemmy communities may also be in the wrong instance). It is also not surprising that most discussions will be in larger servers. I think it would improve Lemmy if niche questions like my threads post here(though collapse community sounds more targeted) were redirected to the larger Lemmy communities . Even if 90 percent of the people do not understand the topic that would mean 10 percent and with percentage that could amount to hundreds of people even at 99 percent.
I keep forgetting Lemmy has voting features. I never used them on Reddit.
Anyway, the key is attracting people who generate content. Finding people who consume content is comparatively easy. A good way to start is to generate content yourself, and leveraging that to convince other content creators to work alongside you. It’s a lot of work, takes time, and you can’t fake it.
I’m one of those weirdos that is happy to generate content somewhere like Lemmy even if no one sees it. I think I have two comments on my instance (and as far as I know, I run the only instance in my country, or at the very least the first). Although content only comes through when I have time to do interesting things. Feel free to link to it if that’s helpful to you, although it’s very engineering-focused.
I think that long term, native content is the only solution – things that originate here. Other platforms can scramble to repost our stuff if they want.