Its as if you read my mind.

When I first came to Steemit (granted, that was just barely 2 weeks ago), outside the possibility of earning a few dollars, I saw an opportunity to plant my flag. Like you said, the big content producers are not here yet. Maybe they're waiting to see how the platform evolves or they're not yet convinced that its a platform worth investing in. Regardless, my take is that while they ponder their next move, I already have a head start here, building a platform for the type of content I will publish.

That is also the reason why I'm not so bothered by all the posts I've seen complaining about the quality of the content in trending and the use or misuse of bidbots. From where I'm sitting, these things tend to self-correct in the long run. Think Google and SEO, a few years back you could easily rank on top of Google's results by spamming keywords and using all sorts of blackhat techniques. You could outperform the big websites by just implementing good (sometimes downright devious) SEO techniques. But Google got smart. Now the kind of webpages that make it to the top are either those published on big sites (Forbes, wikipedia, etc.) or those that really have high-quality content.

On the community front, I'll add a cliche to your island and nodes metaphor. How about, "United we stand, divided we fall." The only way we can flourish is if we grow and work together as a community. And I don't just mean that in a sense of togetherness kind of way. There are lots of work to be done and people from every segment in the platform need to find where they fit in the community--content producers, curators, app developers, rule makers, rule enforcers. There are a lot of jobs in a decentralized society and the lack of a leader means community members will have to figure out how to divide the work and get the job done themselves. So, it's our task to figure out what job we can do to help the larger community and band together with similar individuals who can do this job. At least, that's how I interpreted your mention of "niche communities".

So, like you said, while it is all quiet on the content front, I'll be here figuring out what should be my role in the larger community, looking for a niche community to help me in this role, all while growing my content, and contributing as much as I can, in preparation for the arrival of the mainstream audience and the return of the inactive users. Hopefully by then I'll have grown enough and surrounded myself with the right people to be a valuable asset so I can withstand what's coming and help others to success.