This is my thoughts as well. I’ve noticed that once one or two people express interest in a post, it tends to get much more traffic

I used to lurk like crazy on reddit. I had a nearly 12 year old account that mainly had a few comments here and there months apart, and only a few posts but ever since moving to Lemmy I've found myself actually posting relatively frequently to help build some of the smaller communities I'm in that have also migrated.

Only if the content is organic. Look at !photoshopbattles@lemmy.world . Full of bot posts from reddit with 0 comments. Even if one of them gets a comment, it would get drowned out by the subsequent bot posts. Blindly filling a community with bot posts would eventually make people unsub from it.

It depends on the content.

Some of content really depends on OP being in the comments, like AmITheAsshole. Just reposting doesn't give the kind of interaction that the original post would have.

Ongoing discussion—i.e., comments replying to other comments, not just posts—drives engagement as much as content. If the post-to-comment ratio is too high, active commenters are less likely to encounter each other in the sea of automated posts.

You're doing it right. That's exactly how to build momentum! 💪

Hah, that sounds like me! I started a few communities in places where I knew I could supply some OC, and so far its been mostly just me posting my stuff, but I'm stoked whenever I get comments!

No doubt, it’s a chicken or egg problem.

Yeah, a ratio means nothing if the bulk of the comments are only on a small portion of the posts. If 90% of the posts have 0 comments and the other 10% have 52.7 comments per post, that’s worth knowing.

The problem is that without an effective way to ID bot content then stats like this could be covering up the real trends in human users, particularly in any stat that purports to measure all lemmy instances since we already know there are instances out there filled with thousands of bot users

It does need that, but it also needs dedicated posters for small niche communities that keep posting into the void so that when someone eventually stumbles over they won't go "aw it's dead here, I guess Lemmy isn't for me" but will actually find some content to engage with instead.

Assimilate this! 🔫