Text based communities require a large population to really work. R4R style communities will be limited by the regional limitations of a smaller community. If you're looking to meet up(or even for just chatting), fewer people means less of a chance of finding a compatible person in terms of turn ons/fetish alignment who is also in your geographic area.

Aside from the meetup communities, the story oriented communities require a lot of effort. It takes time and effort to write a story that doesn't sound like terrible fanfic and chances are high you'll put that effort in for it to get lost in the void. Most people probably won't read it, let alone interact. Finding the people who will go that far is again just a factor of how large the population is because it's a less popular form of media.

The best thing you can do is help get those communities going by contributing your own stories. I'd like to get /c/stories_gonewild going, but I don't want it to just be me.

We’re mostly nerds here. We need more users of all backgrounds before we get any of what you’re talking about going. Use both and mention Lemmy to help the growth. You’re free to create communities like you mentioned on my instance.

It takes a lot of people to support those communities because they have a very high proportion of lurkers.

It's not as smooth to navigate on here for a variety of reasons and circumstances. It makes connecting on here casually and instantly difficult. And people need to be frisky at the right moment and time so unless there's enough users on at different times in the right communities in the right instances on the compatible algorithms, you just don't get the numbers you need