Thank you @bulldog-joy!
Communities are good for collecting content around a particular topic (like cats!), especially if they are somewhat actively moderated by their founders. As such, they are also a great catalysts for finding those to follow who have similar interests to you.
As for the incentives, a lot of people on Hive are more inclined to scroll through their feed, rather that visit the actual communities... so it can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Community building is not only a lot for work, it's also endless work. It has taken me well over a year to build the Hive Cats Community to just 175-ish subscribers... and I figure I'll need to keep going to 500 before it truly gains a life of its own.
I generally post to a variety of communities, depending on what I am writing about, although I always include the tags #cats and #hivecats.
=^..^=
I can imagine that it takes a bit longer to establish a community. Great effort though. I go through my feeds as well, you are right, barely visiting the communities on its own. I do once in a while but there is so much content to dig through and having little time often, I wanna get an overview of all the communities. 😄