I do not think more content alone would be sufficient.

I have actual data that support the idea that more content can create a virtuous cycle. People loved to complain about alien.top “spamming their feed”, but when the mirror bots were active, the numbers of “organic participation” and subscriber count was increasing faster than the most popular communities on the bigger instances. I kept quiet about it to avoid “inverse Streisand effect” (like the haters pontificating about “these communities are only bots” and spoiling for those who actually didn’t care about interacting with it).