I think it's definitely a weird & difficult balance to try and hit - grow enough to sustain enough active, interesting communities for folks to want to stick around longterm, but not big enough to turn into whatever reddit/twitter/other sites have become. I'm not really sure how to do that, and my only main thought so far as a brand new user here is that it was surprisingly confusing, at least for someone like me with very little technical knowledge/etc. I definitely had to take a sort of "leap of faith" and power through the confusingness to get to this point where I have an account, an instance, am interacting, etc, but I am a little worried that other communities/people who would help create and build awesome communities on here will be confused or discouraged enough to not make it past understanding the site, instances/communities, finding communities they're interested in, etc.

Edit: rereading your comment, I especially felt the "seeing little activity" thing. I've been poking around trying to find communities to subscribe to, to build a page for myself that offers enough of the things I'm interested in, but have been finding most communities empty, mostly empty, or nonexistent, which is unfortunate. I know that logically I can create my own communities if I want, but I don't really know how to do that and start from scratch, so I unfortunately then just end up not being a part of communities I'd be interested in being a part of, and I imagine many others hit the same wall.