I mod the MAUI Community, which was created shortly before Xmas, and I made some announcements then (like on Mastodon, Daily Dew Drop, etc.) and some people joined then.
I'm late to the game but I should point out that the MAUI community is a textbook example of how communities should definitely not be created, and it was clear from the start that it was already born a dead community.
The C# barely gets a single post per week. The .NET community is even more of a niche community, and in spite of all the non-organic posts it's already dead.
Even though you were fully aware of this and you were repeatedly pointed out the obvious fact that a niche of a niche won't take off, you ignored te feedback and still went ahead with the creation of the community. Which is of course dead.
Lemmy in general and programming.dev in particular already have groups with traction. I hope that moving forward the group creation process is based on peeling specialized topics from existing communities. Otherwise the MAUI fiasco will repeat itself and we'll end up with an even longer tail of dead communities vulnerable to spam and takeovers by bad actors.
I'm sorry, you're trying to blatantly lie with statistics.
"Above average" means nothing if the majority of communities is already dead. You're just arguing that some communities are more dead, which is pointless.
You're also lying regarding what traffic is being posted to !dotnetmaui@programming.dev. All posts ranging back to the last two weeks come from a single user account: https://programming.dev/u/SmartmanApps .
To make this even more pathetic, the bulk of the posts going into !dotnetmaui@programming.dev were posted by your account after I pointed out the community was dead and already dead on arrival.
You're not refuting the point: you're proving the point that the community is dead.