Like you said, with so many people online now keeping communities healthy is this precarious balancing act of keeping it just hard enough to find so that it doesn't get flooded yet still discoverable enough for some new members to find it.

I'm always amazed when a search for some oddball question regarding my ISP leads to a recent thread there

This seems like a great place to mention that there is a message board front-end for Lemmy that can make it look like an old phpBB forum:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

https://fedibb.ml/

Hello! This is the one community that I was a bit worried about finding an equivalent of outside of reddit. Hopefully more of us migrate over.