One percent content vs votes. That is a healthier community than you think. The ratio of reads to posts will be even higher.

We just need to create a sustainable level of content while people discover that Lemmy exists,

The biggest problem is “join a server / start a server”. There needs to be a “join any server, still see the best of all communities” option. People come knowing they have heard they should sign-up for Lemmy. They have no idea what server they are looking for. Regardless of what they choose, there needs to be a way of getting a snapshot of “what is happening on Lemmy”. People will self-select and gravitate towards individual communities later.

The magic of places like Reddit was immediate access to a lot of content first and specific content second. People started with Trending before they even knew what a sub was.