Great advices thanks! So you need to be organic, not look like a bot. Obviously, but on the other hand it takes time unfortunately.

Thanks!

ok it works now.

" I have turned off fetching images from 3rd party sites too" - You mean that external links don't come with images? Only text? Where is that option available?

Great, thanks. I also added yours to mine, but cannot search any community. Can you check if your instance finds any of mine? For example https://fedit.pl/c/fediwersum@fedit.pl

Yeah, attracting users is painful. I actually did that with reddit api and private messages but reddit found out and i'm on their blacklist. I'm pretty sure they put a filter on messages with name of my instance. I can see my message sent, but I don't see it in receiver. Basically shadowremoving messages. I'm taking every possible privacy measure (vpn, tor, new account) but it's not working. It's wild. I would now have to use some enigma shit to safely write them. Name of my instance is totally burnt on reddit. Had I knew reddit is so crazy about this I would have acted more carefully from the beginning. These messages can work, but you have to be careful.

Other than that, posting here and there on other social media, and creating original content. Don't really see any other options.

Absolutely, I agree. Rn I'm federated (with a long blacklist of instances from fediseer), but honestly I don't have enough people on board that it makes any difference. I'm in the process of figuring out how to attract users. I managed to plug in fedi-safety which has the ability to run through all images in db to search for adult content and as well it can do i in real time during posting, but in this case it demands that your PC with GPU is constantly running which is not very convenient. But it's there in case I suddenly needed to use it.

My instance is 4 weeks old and I've been spending quite some time on it on a daily basis. I think it could actually be better to have a whitelist of trusted instances than having to constantly be on alert because some new instance is not on your blacklist. For sure, we could do that. We just whitelist each other. You probably won't download content from my site, cause it's all in polish and for the most part I want it to stay that way, but polish people know english pretty well and like to participate in discussion in english from what I see on reddit.

Have you checked other niche instances that could possible also be a part of such an "alliance"? I was only a few times on those big instances and there is too much bs there for me tbh.