Now it's a matter of sustaining and slow growth. Hopefully. Best thing you can do to see Lemmy succeed is participate: comment, post, doomscroll All+Top Hou ;)
It'll take a while for some of the smaller communities to get critical mass. And that's okay, probably. Critical mass is here for the larger topics already. I'll do my best to help :)
The memes are currently overshadowing a lot of other content types, due to how the hot sorting works. Even if a small community is active, it doesn't make it to your front page because its votecount doesn't compete with those of a bigger community.
The "best" sorting type which I hope will come eventually, aims to address this by including one post from each community, before including a second, etc.
This should help small communities which still have activity, to be seen more. Currently, I'm having to go look in smaller communities manually, to see if there are new posts.
Is there a GitHub issue I can follow for this sorting?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622
I find Top - Day to be my favourite sort, even though Hot is much better. I've also subscribed to enough communities that my default is Subscribed + Top - Day or Subscribed + Hot. I'll often dip over to Local, but rarely All. Only downside of the Top sorts is that the shorter the time span, the higher the ratio of cute animal pics. Scratch that, it's not a downside.
Point being, that once you have enough active communities subscribed, that seems to be the best. Local is good if you are on an instance that meshes well with your interests.
BTW, I'm on Lemmy.ca, so Local will show me news from across Canada usually.
Using top sort like this is not even close to a solution.
I want to see posts from a community with ten subs, that get ten upvotes, meaning that post was really good for the people it was for.
Top will never show that. It will show posts that got a hundred upvotes first even if that sub has ten thousand users, meaning relatively, it was a worse post.
My point is that I WANT to see content from small less active communities. How else are they supposed to grow? Even my subscriptions are bad, never showing me all that I want to see.