Yep, best thing you can do it post and comment. The 90:10 rule of lurkers to content creators likely applies. But critical mass requires the lurkers to stick around -- because some percentage of them will eventually turn into content creators. When someone from Reddit checks out Lemmy for the first time, they're going to evaluate based on volume of content and discussion. If the equivalents of their favourite subs are all ghost towns, they'll just leave back for reddit. So the ratio needs to be higher to get the ball rolling.

I'm taking my own advice. On Reddit, I was fairly active. 11 year account, moderated one largish sub, 17k post karma, 200k comment karma. I still moderate that sub, because the community is important. But I've got a stickied post pointing to the equivalent on Lemmy.

But it's super quiet in there, by comparison, and I cannot be the sole source of content in a community, or it just becomes me shouting down the void. This same pattern is likely repeating across the fediverse.

But there's hope. Yesterday, two of the communities I've been trying to seed got their first external posts. !geology@lemmy.ca and !spacemusic@lemmy.ca.