The frustrating aspect is that it isn’t dead here. I’ve been on dead forums where you make a post and nothing happens. On Lemmy I’ve posted on seemingly dead or near dead communities, and received a flurry of response in the form of votes and comments. There are definitely people subscribed, and willing to comment, but very few people posting threads. It is a bottleneck to have users all waiting for somebody else to post something.
I hope anybody reading this comment understands that in a smaller ecosystem they can’t just passively wait for content to fill the feed. There needs to be more contribution in the form of posts, and hopefully posts that go beyond just memes (memes are great and fun, but Lemmy desperately needs posts that go beyond just that) or arguing about politics (politics are important, but exhausting). More activity on interest, and hobby communities, especially with original content adds uniqueness here.