Great question, dont know the answer. Just didnt want you to feel like no one responds to this post either lol. I think generally like 90% of people are lurkers, so if you have 450 subs theres only like 45 people who are posters and even smaller subset post regularly. Of those, subset again and you have poeple who'll post on your community. My guess is it will take a while but youre doing really good imo, the larger the community the more likely people are to sub and the bigger your subsets get. Keep it up! Whats your community?

It takes so long time. I do subscribe to your geocaching community, and I read them, I'm curious about them but I have nothing really to contribute.

We're in the wild west phase of growing Lemmy. Beyond general interest, technology, world news, it's going to be hard to get the critical mass of people to a conversation going.

Keep up the hard work! I appreciate it

Congrats on growing a community!

Off the top of my head, what I remember from Reddit is that most subs with less than a thousand members barely had any activity. You can get lucky though, and just happen to have new people subscribing who are as passionate as you about the hobby and as vocal, but that's unusual.

I think there's another factor affecting your specific community growth and interaction. Here in Texas, it's still blistering hot outside. Once it cools down, many of us in the hotter locations will start geocaching again.

What a coincidence, I just started getting back into geocaches myself!

Anyway, all the advice here is great, but I'd also like to point out that we are on the fediverse. There aren't that many people here, compared to other platforms, and the demographic is certainly skewed one way. You can definitely use these in your favor, but don't get discouraged when you're "only" pulling a few hundred, when that pretty solidly puts the community into one of the big ones (again, comparatively speaking). Things are just a bit more quiet here.

Advertise. And Geocaching is a great way to do it.

I'd recommend a post in the community encouraging people to put a url and/or QR code into some geocaches. Maybe with a sticky at the top of the community that explains what Lemmy is.

Consider the point of view of a person who finds the QR code in the geocache.

I empathize with your situation. I'm in the same boat. Even with hundreds of subscribers, if everyone's lurking then the community gets stale and withers. Becoming a one-person content machine isn't sustainable.

Though on a brighter note, with this post you just gained a subscriber to your community. Browsing through it reminded me of how fun geocaching was. I just dusted off my old geocaching.com account from a decade ago. I'll have to take my kids out and see what we can find!

A lot of posts here have given out wonderful and helpful ideas! I can't provide any more on top of this, but I want to speak to this:

How long to grow a community

However long it takes. Some communities never take off, some communities that seem obscure will sometimes propel to popularity. However long you keep at it is 100% completely up to you! As long as you are finding some fulfilling or enjoyment out of it. You don't owe anybody anything in this regard. If you are tired or stressed from it, there is nothing wrong with dropping the community you tried to grow. You tried to start something, and that is commendable in itself.

With that said, I enjoy geocaching every few months or so when I look into it! Unfortunately there aren't that many caches near me. I'll subscribe and maybe make a few caches of my own!

Just commenting here so I can check responses later...

That's easily one of the faster growing communities on Lemmy. That's like 0.3% of active monthly users. 1-in-300 people is not bad at all.

I hear geocaches are often huge and obvious to see from the road.

If you want engagement, post something incorrect. People love to fix stuff. (I'm mostly kidding..). Good luck with your community!

Is the growth pattern exponential, bursty, steady? If it's the first, you're practically doubling every two months.

Now that I know about it, I’ll sub!

There is no meaningful averages. It depends on how much interest there is in the topic and how well you manage to get the word out so people know to look for it. In most cases it is a long, slow process.

There is a tipping point. When you start there is very little content because there are very few members. The low activity tends to keep new people from joining. Once you have enough people to maintain a reasonable level of posting it becomes a lot easier to keep it growing. Getting to that point can be frustrating. Just remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Set a goal of so many posts per day. The best posting times are 0700, 1100, and 1630 EST for maximum exposure.

Be sure to post links to your community on social media (FB, Twitter. Mastodon, Blue Sky, Instagram, and all the rest).

Expect to spend 20-60 hours a week driving users to your content.

Don't worry if it grows slowly. Niche communities are the best thing about Lemmy. Better to have a small loyal community than a big one flooded with crap.

Think about it like this, in 2 months youve found over 400 people who care about what you have to say.

It's impossible to answers that some can take few weeks, some few month, some few year and some will never grow

It lives or it dies. Why care either way?