This is super helpful, thank you very much.

It was actually easy to create it (I’m on lemm.ee instance) the hard part is I think just being able to maintain engagement.

Agreed! I started a community a couple days ago and I also browsed through the descriptions of other communities to get an idea of what we should put in one (I have no experience moderating subreddits or anything like that) and I found that many had little to nothing in the sidebar.

My experience was exactly like you describe, I see we even ended up using the same instance. Only reason I chose this one was because it was the top option in the Memmy app.