I think one of Lemmy’s issues is that everyone wants to create a community instead of contributing to what’s here. People expect to have all the “niche hobby” communities like Reddit had right off the bat, but we don’t have the mass of people to support that - especially when you can have multiple communities for one topic across instances. Everything dilutes to nothing.

So we end up with nearly a 1:1 user/community ratio and every community either gets abandoned or only has 1 power-user posting.

I think the solution is essentially what you’re doing - to take existing communities and breathe life into them. Start out small and focused, and then branch out when it feels necessary.