It was better before people absolutely fucking insisted on scraping reddit posts to bring over here. Post after post after post of regurgitated bot posts, without a single comment, no engagement at all. Fun!
But but but... I want the little offshoot niche community to grow! I also want content to get seen by more than 5 people.
In reality there just isn't the user mass to make small/niche communities viable right now, so you see more general communities filling the void.
An easy example is 3D printing. There are two 3D printing communities in the lemmyverse. There's also a 'fix my print' community that's a ghost town and a few printer specific communities that are also ghost towns. Posts in these more specialized communities tend to get a consistent level of votes, but very few comments.
I've intentionally been trying to seed more content, but it's hard without literally posting the same thing in two spots.
Have you checked if the source sites of the articles being shared have RSS feeds? That would be a more optimal way to aggregate articles from a few sites than communities, depending on what you're after.
Although, amusingly enough, you could also follow the RSS feeds of the news communities instead of doing that, but then there wouldn't have been much of a point to making an account. 😅