A problem I’ve seen also is creating a niche community because you don’t want to just get the general content, but since there’s simple fewer users it’s just dead. And when someone else thinks about switching to Lemmy, they see a bunch of dead communities and are like “oh this site is dead.”

It’s annoying but on a newer site(/federation of sites) those niche communities need to be conversations that start in a more generalized community that enough people want to branch it off into it’s own thing. So there’s already core users, so it’s not DOA.