I mean… The other reason to start in a niche is because one is interested in a narrow subset of the wider topic and wants to avoid the bigger, louder, more mainstream content that dominates the conversation. I get that going up to c/games might have more content but if it’s all about Call of Duty and Madden Football, it’s not for me.
Then we have a real chicken/egg problem - not enough content to discuss and nobody discussing it.
Take a specific c/ like /us_news as an example. The feed is largely made up of timely posts from specific US news sites that are presumably acceptable to members. They can read a digest of the day’s news and react.
Then take a niche example like c/roguelites. There’s maybe one blog about roguelite games I know of where every post is worth reading, rogueliker.com. In Reddit that blog has its own sub but reposts almost every post into r/roguelites. No one minds because (a) the content is good and (b) there’s enough other organic activity in that sub that it doesn’t feel like it’s all just that blog. We have less organic activity overall here, but I’m trying to think of ways to spur engagement so communities have something going on in them.
I like the idea of choosing to focus deeply on enriching the content in certain communities. I think a huge tool in that fight is carefully using an “RSS to Lemmy” bot to pipe good quality feeds of relevant content into communities for further discussion around. If there’s an authoritative blog site that reliably writes good content that’d be relevant to a subLemmy audience, it might be a welcome addition.
Couldn’t a sub moderator regulate that in real time though? Ideally they shouldn’t have to do too much of that, but in my experience many RSS feeds have a consistent volume of posts per day. I’m talking about choosing 1-2 feeds that post under 10 posts per day total, and an attentive mod could kibosh up to 3-4 if they’re not relevant to what the community wants. Could even put keyword filters on the feeds so relevant posts never hit the sub in the first place.