Creating a community is easy. Being the sole content creator and marketing your community until it becomes self-sustaining is very very hard. Moderating it once it becomes sustainable is moderately hard (pun intended)

Creating a community is super easy.

The initial moderation is also quite easy, though you need to dedicate some time to build the initial userbase and write clear, concise, reasonable rules.

What I can tell you from personal experience though is that maintaining a community after it grows is hard, and time consuming, and you’ll absolutely need extra moderators and moderator tools.

Right now, today, on Lemmy no communities are big enough for this to be a concern. However, Reddit also started small. Be prepared.

No not at all

Depends on the type of community. I am the PS5 community creator. There is constant news available for discussions but you have to be consistent and patient. For other types of communities it is probably harder to even generate content. It helps to make friends with other mods also if your community has “neighbors” so to speak. For me that would be other console communities and gaming communities.

If you’re gonna start something like c/birdswitharms you’re probably gonna have a harder time gaining traction.