I have this little nightly ritual, 20 min tops, that I think is helping increase engagement here on beehaw. It would be amazing if others picked up the torch.
My goal is Lemmy should be THE PLACE to go to catch up and talk about the world. That can't happen if things are happening that are never posted to Lemmy. So posting content to Lemmy encourages more people to come and they post and so on and so on.
To post content to Lemmy I follow these steps
Find out what's here
Scroll subscribed, local or a specific community on new. Your goal should be to just be aware of what's been posted already.
Scroll until you are seeing 8 hours old posts. Wont take long there isn't a lot of content here.
Do the same for active sort. Just peak you don't need to do a lot of scrolling. Again just be aware
Look for what's missing
Now go to each of your other apps you use. Apps you want Lemmy to replace and look for interesting content that was not posted to Lemmy. Focused on things people are engaging with. High likes, high comments.
Post that content!!!
Done. You've just drop kicked the launch button that will blast Lemmy into space. Don't feel like you need to take on all the areas of Lemmy. If you have a single community you can do this for then it goes a long way.
Agreed, the reason I chose beehaw, among other things, was that the focus of other instances was growth for growth's sake, while beehaw seemed to be looking to cultivate a more thoughtful, moderate growth, avoiding lowest common denominator problems that Reddit was plagued by by 2014.
So my rule of thumb would be more to ask "do I personally want to talk about this" than "is this popular and getting engagement" before thinking about posting something.