It really depends on the type of community. I created a few a missed from Reddit and honestly the screenshot/photo based communities are piss easy to start. !badrealestate for example is 3 weeks old with 48 posts and 3.6k subscribers. I just posted every day for a few weeks, now other people are posting and I contribute a couple of times a week.

On the other hand !tennis_fans and !downtherabbithole are much harder to get going because they require very regular or in depth text posts. Those two have less than 200 subscribers between them.

What I find really annoying is when people criticise posts on the communities I’ve created, when they haven’t contributed at all. People want more communities, people want more content. Don’t be a dick and then criticise the content that someone has put their time and effort into sharing with you for your enjoyment! Anyway, rant over.

If anyone’s browsing this thread and looking for more (active) communities to join, there’s also !DontYouKnowWhoIAm !clevercombacks !murderedbywords and !confidently_incorrect

Yeah, bothered me during the protests to see people downplaying the importance of mods from those who were upset about their favorite sub being shut down. It's a thankless job that takes lot of building to get started and exposure to bunch of crap to keep the place nice for its users.

Anyway, I just wanted to give an alternate viewpoint to those which are suggesting that people became mods as a power trip or whatever. That’s certainly not the case for me - ideally, I don’t even particularly want to be a mod, but I did want the communities to have a foothold for people arriving to Lemmy with no idea what to expect.

There's a big difference between creating 2 communities and creating 20.

As awkward as it may feel, but if you are the only person creating content, then there IS content at least. It doesn't make sense to do nothing and just hope that other people will eventually fill the void, as random visitors will take one look at the community and think "eh, it's empty, no use in staying here" and just move on. Someone has to make the first step.

Of course a little bit of advertisement can't hurt as well, but content comes first.

Do it, the promote your community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world

There are usually people there who will help you, at least upvoting and commenting

What community are you planning to post to?

There is a sub on reddit where for ~6 months 95% of the content was me, bunch of links staggered weekly. Then suddenly it picked up steam because somewhere off-reddit someone found it and dragged a whole bunch people along.

But if i hadn't been posting, then that wouldn't have happened.

I created a community on Lemmy.world named after my own username just to test things and post random shit... A lot of it gets upvoted so people are definitely seeing it but I don't think I've got any subscribers on that one...

I also had a night where I was pretty tipsy early on in my Lemmy days where I created a number of other communities... Only one or two have any subscribers and I'm usually still the .ain one who generates content.