As awkward as it may feel, but if you are the only person creating content, then there IS content at least. It doesn’t make sense to do nothing and just hope that other people will eventually fill the void, as random visitors will take one look at the community and think “eh, it’s empty, no use in staying here” and just move on. Someone has to make the first step.

Of course a little bit of advertisement can’t hurt as well, but content comes first.

Do it, the promote your community on [email protected]

There are usually people there who will help you, at least upvoting and commenting

What community are you planning to post to?

Make sure you go to each of the major lemmy instances and and subscribe, search, or ensure your community is federated for those instances all feed.

Then just post, and try to spark interest and discussion, maybe once or twice a week, as a form of advertising your community exists and is a place for people interested in what have you

There is a sub on reddit where for ~6 months 95% of the content was me, bunch of links staggered weekly. Then suddenly it picked up steam because somewhere off-reddit someone found it and dragged a whole bunch people along.

But if i hadn’t been posting, then that wouldn’t have happened.

I created a community on Lemmy.world named after my own username just to test things and post random shit… A lot of it gets upvoted so people are definitely seeing it but I don’t think I’ve got any subscribers on that one…

I also had a night where I was pretty tipsy early on in my Lemmy days where I created a number of other communities… Only one or two have any subscribers and I’m usually still the .ain one who generates content.

It’s possible your posts could get boosted by new/all sorters and make it to hot/all even with no subscribers, but I would recommend trying to advertise the community and get subs first to improve your odds of growing your audience