Basically, that’s it.
I’m a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, but the issue is that apart from the 2-3 top ones, the others are usually very quiet.
I know it’s a chicken and egg problem (as you need content for people to come and participate), but for instance with movies, I’m always torn between posting the content in the French-speaking community, or the much larger !movies@lemm.ee, where I know that the audience is much bigger. Same for science, history, most topics actually.
I don’t expect anyone to have a magical formula (the most obvious solution being just having more speakers of that language on Lemmy), but I was curious to see if other people in the same situation had insights to share.
A few years ago, definitely.
Today, with the widespread usage of the Internet to most of the population, I’m not so sure. There are link aggregators operating in other languages, such as https://www.meneame.net/ for Spanish for instance, and they are quite popular and active. As someone else mentioned, even languages like Czech (10 millions speakers) have active communities on Reddit.