I didn't realize the count of active users was that low, though whether I should really consider that a positive or a negative overall is a bit unclear haha.
I guess my biggest gripe is that I was sold the premise of "be the change you want to see" in terms of getting a community more active. I'm something like a thousand posts later and it's not clear whether all that effort made much of a difference. Looking at the front page (default sorting) from a year ago and engagement is only up modestly. It's good that it's up rather than down I suppose, but I kinda thought there'd be more peeps pitching in by now, even if it was just a handful of hardcore talent-specific fans posting exclusively about that respective talent.
Onlookers probably see my activity here and think I'm some kind of hardcore fan completely immersed in holo, but I identify as a hardcore casual fan, and don't usually follow things that closely unless it's for a specific reason like when I've been finding stuff to post. If the community was already moderately active before I got here, I'd probably only post a little - I just stepped up because I wanted an active community to participate in without resorting to reddit/xitter/discord for it. (plus I already have a history in fanart communities, so starting out just sharing recent fanart that I liked was easy enough)
It feels hard to discuss it without coming across as pretty whingy, but if all the effort seems to barely move the needle, it does make me wonder if it's worth it. And while it really is nice that you (and I'm sure some others!) appreciate it perhaps more than I do, doing it does suck up a not-trivial amount of time and effort from other things I want to do - things where I actually know that at the end I can get the result I want (which as above is unclear here). It's hard to find the time to do things like make an entire poorly-optimized shitpost-website anymore :(
I do kinda worry that if some unknown threshold of post diversity isn't reached then people won't find the "sub" useful (that's why ages back I diversified away from just posting mostly fanart), but since I'm not satisfied with the status quo right now either, I guess I might just scale back for a while and see how it goes.
Now that the email's been swapped over, is the warning on the aussie.zone sidebar still needed?