Not OP, but for me, the main community I interact with reddit for exists, there's just no activity there. It's currently the off-season (the community is hockey), so I think there's no point in trying to grow the community at this moment. Hopefully in the fall we can get some traffic.

The main posts on r/hockey are just links to Twitter, as all the news is posted there first. I think they may even have bots on Twitter that post all of the links. If in the fall we are still as barren as we are now, I might communicate with the mods and ask if that's something that they would be open to if I'm willing to write the bot.

I get what you going to say but clapping with one hand just doesn’t work. I mainly go to soccer sub in Reddit and it’s easily over 20k people online at any given time. Here in soccer sub it’s only like 4k follower and daily active people of ~40people. No matter how hard I try to talk to it will be only to myself.