The Lyrics Game

Is that really all that surprising though? Novelty is a powerful incentive. The folks that were bolstering your early numbers are probably those who are specifically hunting for brand new or small communities. I'd wager that these users typically post more frequently than the average. However, much like you are experiencing right now, once the novelty of a new community concept fades, if those posters don't get the engagement they wanted on their test balloon posts, they will write the community off as dead and move on.

As the person with the most skin in the game for this community, your steadfastness is what will provide the base upon which others will build, but you should be prepared to either suffer the grind until the community has built a self-sustaining ecosystem of posters, commenters, and lurkers who upvote. Alternatively, if you're getting burnt out from feeling like you're screaming into the void, you can walk away (intentionally this time, not because of a hospital visit). Return later if you feel reenergized, but you don't have to. It's just an internet forum.

Also, I do think you are underselling the difficulty of posting in this community a little bit. I've been toying around with Craiyon, based on the recommendation of your sticky post, trying to generate an image for Iron Maiden's "The Trooper". It's a fairly cinematic song, should be easy to generate an image that fits, right? Plug in a couple of the most evocative lines and you're off to the races. Not so much, I'm finding. Dumping the lyrics in raw gets me various depictions of horses and not much else. Okay, back to the drawing board. In my own words, I describe a 19th century cavalry charge. Closer, but it lacks any of the touchstones from the lyrics themselves. Also, the resulting images themselves are various degrees of janky in the way that the free image generators typically are. Sure, I could just throw it out there in the spirit of providing content for people to chew through, but I might argue that a tidal wave of low effort posts is more damaging to the health of most new community than few posts of relative high quality. And, again, this is all for a song that is very specific in the imagery it evokes. I'd imagine trying something more esoteric would need even more revisions and iterations to get dialed in to a point where someone has a shot at guessing.

Other than a very brief period of time when these sort of generators were first making waves in TTRPG DM communities, this is the only time I've messed around with these types of programs, so I don't really know how to best revise or write these prompts. It ends up being a lot of trial and error. Which, yeah, if I'm just throwing out a test post to gauge the response, no big deal. But I don't think it should shock you that someone may not be interested in doing that on a regular basis. It seems like you possibly have some degree of experience with these programs (at least looking at the quality of the outputs you've been posting), and I think you may be letting that cloud your perception of the time investment.

As a final point regarding engagement in this community, I'm not sure this is the sort of game that breeds huge amounts of comments and whatnot. Using your Journey post as an example, I posted a guess, you responded with an emoji, and now that post is now effectively dead unless things go wildly off topic in the comments. Not that that's a bad thing if you're okay with it as the community manager, but I'd guess it is probably the exception to the rule. In the reverse situation, if I come across a post which has stumped me, I'm more likely to just keep scrolling on to the next thing because I wouldn't want to ruin the chance someone else might have at guessing it "honestly" (so to speak) by asking for clues. That's admittedly silly, but I don't think the sentiment is unique to me.

I don't mean to bust your chops, I do really like this concept and hope it finds its footing. I just think you may have been overly optimistic with your expectations.