Hmm, it looks like you're mod of ~three fairly dormant communities that have very small user bases. Unfortunately, at that size I wouldn't think there'd be much in the way of regular comments, much less guest posts.
In my case I was lucky, because a co-mod and regular poster happened to join in early-on, and we were able to build up the first couple hundred users fairly quickly.
But something else that I think helped a lot was that our community is very visual-oriented, so it was pretty easy to find users who were perfectly happy to join up just to look at pretty images without necessarily clicking links or putting too much thought in to anything deeper. So pandering to the lowest common denominator of user interest seems to work nicely for building up base numbers. That said, there's still a lot of growth we need to do, which likely involves outreach of some kind or another.
Oh shoot, I meant the above for @[email protected] actually, i.e. OP. I don't believe you had replied to me at any point, hence that wasn't meant for you.
That said-- I'm not too sure the "90:9:1" rule applies so well to the FV. For one thing, it seems like a good number of subscribers tried out Lemmy (etc) at some point and then went back to Reddit (etc), meaning they're no longer really here. Another point is that since the FV moves a lot more slowly than Reddit, I question whether FV users are as active here compared to other places.
About the bias of me seeing only part of Small44's community numbers due to filtering by my own instance-- you're right of course, but after double-checking their overall global numbers, they're actually only a tiny bit larger. Ironically or not, most of their users came from my own instance (lemm.ee). So their numbers across three communities are really too small to ever be properly viable IME.
Geez, that's... not good. :S
https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]