Lemmy does have the unfortunate problem, that even if you sub to a community, you wont necessarily see the posts from it if you also sub to something big. The bigger community just completely drowns out the smaller one in your feed.

Hopefully this gets addressed in how sorting works, but for now it's preventing small communities from getting engagement.

I'm sorta gaming the system by posting regularly, and just, more. I'm basically edging on spamming, but this results in there always being a post fresh enough to be in people's feeds. This leads to discovery, if not engagement. I also have alts across the big instances, from which I sub to my own communities to increase the reach of the community when it's new. They have to manually be subbed to by a first user, to get federated to new instances and show up in all, otherwise.

This is how I got !gameart@sopuli.xyz off the ground. Approaching 1k subs now.