Just make a community. Build it, they will come.
This is exactly what I’ve done, but I must say that in the particular community’s case, it hasn’t been easy. We’re going on 1.5yrs now, 900+ subscribers, and I’ve personally contributed ~360 posts (most of them curated mini-articles) out of 466 total posts, yet the sub still essentially needs me to provide the content.
So IME, niche-type subs can take a hell of a lot of work to take off, and we’re not even that much of a niche.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
It doesn’t look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the ‘all’ / ‘filtering’ side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you’ll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.
The good news is that there’s no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit’s cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you’ll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.
The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.
Block FlyingSquid
You mean the user that moderates some Star Trek stuff and Out of Context Comics? What’s the problem..?
The Lemmysphere sure seems to get slammed a lot at places like r/RedditAlternatives. I wonder if possibly some of that is sockpuppet-stuff, as unlikely as that sounds. Still, more than ever we live in the age of misinformation and manipulation by opposition groups & monied interests, so the idea & practice is certainly on the table.
Unfortunately, there’s also the reputation of at least one of the primary Lemmy coders. Seems like the sooner Kbin, Mastodon, etc can get better integrated, the less notable that should be. *knock on wood*