One of the problems with other communities is that people don't notice them en post in the general GEMS community.
I'm running a community (Cycling Community) myself and it quite hard to make your community known to your target audience. I've been running my community for long time now and have done some promotion by upvoting cycling posts in other communities and refering to Cycling Community.
A lot of niche communities are in the OCD incubation program and with that support community owners can nominate blogs in their communities that may receive OCD upvotes. So posting in niche communities that have OCD support can get you some nice rewards.
But you do have to check whether the community you are posting in is still active.
Yeah I can imagine something as niche as cycling would be a constant struggle to grow. Especially when a lot of cycling posts are probably quite similar to photography ones and result in people posting in other communities more photography focused.
The OCD stuff is a good idea for giving communities a bit more interest through the curation side of things but it's only really a temporal solution. Get too big and your community is out to which the problem returns as curation dwindles. It's also quite a time and effort extensive concept for a lot of people with all the responsibilities of reading through posts, checking the accounts, nominating, etc.
Things like commentrewarder are a great idea since that doesn't entirely rely on a large group of people doing a ton of things all at once, and it definitely does improve some engagement. I don't think there's a specific solution to any of this though, I don't think it's necessarily a problem of specific groups or individuals not pulling their weight but more just the fact that Hive really is still in its infancy. If niche communities are struggling to chug along then it's usually just a case of low interest. And the low interest of course ripples into things like curation rewards which don't help things. But even if we had 1000 people posting daily in one community, it wouldn't mean much if none of them had the HP to upvote each other. Fatigue would still be inevitable.
OCD is great. It takes a while to grow too big for OCD support though. And in the meantime I keep growing the stake of my community account and gathering delegations to increase the upvotes and curation rewards.
Commentrewarder is also nice, but it needs to be done by the author itself.
I'm playing with the idea to setup a curation service to rewards comments, but I need some time to develop.