Self-sustaining community effort? Good luck with that.
A lot of people are only write blog posts on Steemit, but they don't care about the contents of others.
I only upvote others (I don't do self-upvotes) since 2018.03.20, but most of my upvotes nowadays are comes from Musing, Sm-voter (free upvote bot for Steem Monsters posts), Busy (free automatic upvote bot for using Busy.org and the "busy" tag), Minnowsupport (free upvote bot).
I rarely receive real, human comments under my posts.
There are a lot of similar people to me. Their posts are basically ignored. So much for the community effort. Not to mention the thousands of people, who are left (or leaving) Steemit. I currently (nowadays) have 929 followers, but most of them are inactive nowadays. They left Steemit long (months) ago.
Hope so. We don't need a lot of names to be alive. We just need people that care enough.
It's natural and that's how real and valued engagement is to the platform. Engagement is more important than the upvotes one gets because it's all empty victory if nobody bothers to comment on your work after having so many accounts upvote it.
It's a given. But these people would not understand how simple engagement on strangers can affect their routine on the platform. I haven't been active in the platform due to real life drama but when I was, I used to be dropping several comments on curation spree. They do return the favor back and most don't but I get a few followers and that's good enough for me.
I delegated to steem-ua which adds my ranking whenever I have new followers, in exchange, the upvote weights on the program gets higher for me. They don't need to engage with me but their follows help me for a long time.