I keep forgetting Lemmy has voting features. I never used them on Reddit.
Anyway, the key is attracting people who generate content. Finding people who consume content is comparatively easy. A good way to start is to generate content yourself, and leveraging that to convince other content creators to work alongside you. It's a lot of work, takes time, and you can't fake it.
I'm one of those weirdos that is happy to generate content somewhere like Lemmy even if no one sees it. I think I have two comments on my instance (and as far as I know, I run the only instance in my country, or at the very least the first). Although content only comes through when I have time to do interesting things. Feel free to link to it if that's helpful to you, although it's very engineering-focused.
I think that long term, native content is the only solution -- things that originate here. Other platforms can scramble to repost our stuff if they want.