I've basically lost all interest in keeping my communities alive at this point. I tried posting daily myself, I encouraged others to join in, I had bots pulling content from reddit to have any activity there, people grew discontent but didn't post themselves. Basically back to square one and don't feel like starting out again. Guess I'm good without them
That's fine, your niches were probably too small for the current lemmy population.
Souls-like fans will probably have to go to more generalist video game communities
I checked out a couple of your posts on reddit where you also mention that we had an active community of around 70k people across the entirety of Lemmy. I was under the impression that we're a lot more. In light of that, it makes sense they didn't pop off more. Shittydarksouls seems general enough to gather enough people