Reddit

Except, the local alternative here is completely deserted.

The local community is deserted because it's deserted. Which sounds like a dumb thing to say, but the community on reddit survives because the users and content are already there. They have no reason to come here if there's no content for them to interact with. But we all know that a minority of users post a majority of content, and nobody wants to post content where there's nobody to interact with it. The ones that post content have to be the first to leave, and then the rest might follow.