I'm somewhere between A and B at this point. The community I mod is fairly niche, so I was not really expecting a massive flood of interaction. It did grow pretty quickly at the start, but that growth has slowed down a fair bit since then.
The main challenge for me is that, aside from 1-2 posts by others, I am the only one who has been finding and posting new content, making me the only one keeping it 'alive' so to say. I've been managing alright, but I wonder what will happen if I get busy and am unable to make new posts...
I think the major problem with Lemmy (not just NSFW Lemmy, but I'll focus on that side) is one of user count and volume of content. On Reddit, there is a massive collection of populated, active subs, spanning all manner of desires and kinks, from common to rare. This simply does not exist on NSFWLemmy at the moment. For example, let's say a user is looking for content focused on female abs.
On Lemmy, there is:
- !fitgirls with 5.39K members
- !thickfit with 500 members, and no new posts since 5 months ago
- !fbb (female body builders) with ~400 members, and no new posts since 23 days ago
- no communities directly focused on abs
Over on Reddit, there is:
- r/fitgirls with 1 million members
- r/FitNakedGirls with 1.2 million members
- plus a lot more 'general' subs I'm neglecting
as well as subs focused exactly on what the user is looking for, all with a very large member count, when compared to LemmyNSFW's most populated communities
- r/HottestAbs with 55k members
- r/SkinnyWithAbs with 173k members
- r/PetiteWithAbs with 10k members
The problem with this, is a prospective user is being asked to choose between a platform that has a steady stream of fresh, high quality content of exactly what they want, and one that is offering less, more infrequent, and more general content. From a pure consumption standpoint, there are really very few reasons to pick Lemmy over Reddit. I think, until there exists a compelling reason to use Lemmy, powerful enough to start self sustaining growth, this platform will continue to struggle with the problems that come with a low user count on a site focused around content consumption.