A little bit everyday. :) It was the same on Reddit until enshittification started, probably around the time porn disappeared from the front page. Lemmy is actually way easier to start communities on than Reddit is now.

Giving your own posts an upvote when you’re at 0 subscribers works wonders. I remember posting in the original version of RoughRomanMemes for literal months without significant interaction until I did that. Something about the ‘active’ feed I guess.

Once the community is grown you don’t need to do that anymore.

I’ve kept at several, no one submits posts even after several weeks of submitting starter posts. It’s just very difficult. People just seem to like the status quo because it’s easier. I had to give up on !cranetrainexcavators@lemmy.world because almost no one was posting but me for an entire month, well that and plus I just ran out of things to post.

Trying !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world now, I’ll probably keep at that since public policy is a huge personal interest. It’s had some activity but it’s like trying to run up an escalator backwards with a 100lb pack blindfolded and drugged. lol. /c/politics even added it on the sidebar and there is almost no posts except mine. Posted links in several other communities including /c/newcommunities .

It’s just hard, not sure why my above comment was downvote so much. It’s hard, not impossible, but hard. I feel like it would benefit Lemmy if the devs were to modify the algorithm to promote rising new communities over existing ones to even the playing field. They tried with scaled sort, but I don’t think people use it much.