Best not give it a tenth day.

You're telling us we have unrealistic expectations when you've been here for 9 days. Clearly we don't have unrealistic expectations if we enjoy being here with its "limited activity" (compared to reddit). You just don't understand why we prefer it and are arguing instead of listening to people answer the question you asked.

I watched reddit grow for the 13 years I was active on it. I remember when it was small and just a forum like Something Awful and not the monster it became. I preferred that way. Lemmy is kinda similar to those early forums, but with its own idiosyncrasies. Be patient and wait to see if you like it, or fuckin leave, idc.

Among other things, it sounds like you're conflating instances and communities. The instance is the server you connect to, the community is the group of posts you read, often on a number of different instances. You only need one person to make an instance, communities usually require more, unless you're using Lemmy/Piefed to make a blog connected to a user base.

You're measuring 'success' by quantity not quality, oblivious to the fact that 95% of that quantity of content is bot-driven ragebait.

The people here have who successfully managed the transition from Reddit never denied there was some good content on Reddit, they just got sick of having to wade through a river of shit to get to it.

If your Lemmy/PieFed experience so far is not what you hoped - make your own place with your own rules. Literally no one can stop you.

The problem is your unrealistic expectations by how you're making it sound like just making an instance means automatic success of a community by denying the reality of just how active the general community as a whole is.

Sounds like you need to either find or make the community you want to see. Which in general, you can do (but some instances don't let you make new communities I think), although it's important to make the community on an instance whose policies are amenable to you.

And then if your community is worth going to, people will come.

Ya, you're definitely confusing instance with community. I get the argument that fragmented communities can be a problem, but the ability to roll your own instance is not the same thing and is in fact the strength of the fediverse.