we have a chicken and egg problem.

people wont come to no content. need people for content.

how do we get traction? so far; generate content via bots, and attempt to teach other communities the benefits of moving wholesale here.

it took reddit 20 years and a lot more gimmicks to get to its size. the fediverse wont happen overnight, nor be an easy haul. need momentum, even if that means reputation points.

I think part of the problem is that even when you're subscribed to the small communities, it's easy to miss the posts. Sorting by Scaled helps a little, but I still often find a post from days ago that I missed.

I'd like an option where you could "super subscribe" or something which makes those posts show up first, or even in the inbox.

I wonder how this will change once lemmy.world updates to 0.19.x, enabling Scaled sorting for those users. My instance is quite small, with mostly the same handful of people talking about shaving and the occasional patent article (also about shaving).

That is not surprising for a site of 50,000 people(though some niche Lemmy communities may also be in the wrong instance

I feel like this isn't as relevant as people think. A community on a small instance may take some additional legwork initially but once one person from a large instance joins a lot of people who sort by all will see it in that other instance.

I imagine people who sort aren't sorting by subscribed are likely sorting by all rather than local because of how spread out popular Lemmy communities are.

I feel like a better solution is to link to other communities when posting in an already niche community. For example if I want to share a video about the lore of the Fallout games mentioning !fallout@sopuli.xyz and !fallout@lemmy.world at the bottom so more people are aware of them and they can both benefit.

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.

Even if 90 percent of the people do not understand the topic

If that happens too much, this people will just leave Lemmy