Growing community activity from nothing

Hi community builders,

I have a blog and want to build a forum alongside it. But I don't know what to do on day one when it's just an empty forum with a few posts just by me.

I'm just wondering, how do you start a forum when you have zero users to begin with? Do you create some fake accounts and fake activity?

Do you pay some early users to hang out and post there to get the discussion going?

I had the same issue with a FB group that I tried to get going. People didn't join because it was so dead.

Am I thinking about this all wrong?