It's genuinely hard as fuck to keep motivation going in a community, especially if it's quite niche. Two of the greatest issues are finding moderators that have the time and motivation to stick around and basically treat it like a part time job, as well as finding a way to ensure those moderators do actually get a little something for their efforts in a financial sense. Otherwise you circle back to the motivation issue again as people realise the time they're putting in may be fun, but not rewarding enough to set aside other activities in life that may have priority and better rewards.
That said, definitely try to find some mods. See if there's anyone active that is willing to help carry some of the weight. See if you can find a way to reward them with the work they do. With the movies one there's two mods; each of us from a different timezone, which really helps monitor things when others aren't around. I think if we had more than two even at our size, it'd be a bit chaotic handling and managing everything. Keep numbers in mind as well.
I'll keep an eye on this place now I know it is going to get a bit of life pushed back into it; curate when I can. I don't think anime is all that niche on here anymore, I think people just need to find this place outside of the numerous larger communities that are more broad they can post in.
Given how low the community participation is right now, it's fairly easy to track what goes on in the community page. I'm just doing most of this stuff for kicks and giggles on Hive time and less about the monetary motivation. When votes don't come, which is what people usually post for, they stop. I'm looking for just a handful of people who just likes to share about this stuff by default.
I'll think about rewarding mods when the community proportionately grows in size but nothing like that seems to be feasible at this point.
Yeah, just something to consider for the future.
I'm sure the community will start to gain traction again now somebody is behind the wheel. Anime/manga is far from a niche these days. :^)
Once you've got that Discord server relaunched, might be worth getting a little contest going to build some awareness and numbers. OCD could probably help with a big push through that, actually.
I know I've said it before: but since our communities are pretty similar, feel free to reach out if you need help or think there's something we could do to contribute. Even if it's finding a way to direct people posting in the Movies & TV Shows community over to The Anime Realm.