Okay, I'm gonna be digging into some old SSOblr lore because
Well, mostly. I was slightly late to the party.
So, in the olden days, there were various things SSOblr did to sustain and improve community engagement, and I do recall a few.
One activity was horse training meetups, usually hosted by @hobbithorsewhat when she was still active.
A lot of people would meet and do a circuit of races across the map. It made doing an otherwise boring or lonely chore much more fun, and earned players a lot of money as a bonus.
Another was themed meetups.
One that I remember assisting/hosting were the fox hunts. You can check these posts to see how that worked, but the TLDR was that it was a flavored form of hide and seek + tag.
One that was more casually planned was @dorianwolfforest 's dressing as hobbits in the snow. True to the theme, it was small, cozy, and plenty of shenanigans.
Another themed event of sorts was Jorvik's Greatest Trail. There were multiples of these across servers and groups. You can find lots of posts and videos for it as well.
(I may even see if I can host one of these when the snow returns with its unique atmosphere, if I got a show of interested hands.)
If you are looking specifically for activities within tumblr, things related to OCs are likely among of the more engageable. People have an easier time talking about things they know well, and in this fandom, their own OCs fit that bill far better than anything else.
Ask singular questions in the SSO tags for others to answer if they wish. Isolated questions are easier for people have limited free time to dedicate to answering.
Alternatively/for those with more free time, find + reblog general OC ask memes and maybe some people will sent an ask, or at least rb from you, which in turn spreads it around SSOblr and helps the creativity and ideas flow.
Create a post for people to put their OC sheets or artwork in.
As an addition to that last idea, make a post of basic facts or story about your own OC as an invitation for other players to potentially interact with. Kind of casual roleplay, if you will.
I would also consult @windforestsso 's OC Map and see which blogs still look active enough to potentially interact with. That's what it was made for.
Speaking of roleplay-esque activities, there were a couple of events hosted relatively recently through @sso-oc-events that got quite a lot of engagement from what I can see. Did an event for the Midsummer and Rainbow Festivals at least. I'd love to see them continue that.
There is also the concept of SSO AUs.
Which is on-theme since SSO itself has retro-ed a lot of its own story. But for all of its inconsistency and incompletion in story and theme, SSO has a wide enough range of base ideas that players can pick and choose what works for their OCs and discard what doesn't.
There's the ancient-but-looks-to-still-be-alive Wild West AU by @carina-go-lightlee
There's a newer one called the SSO Zombie Apocalypse AU by @yourhoeshorses
That's two off the top of my head, anyway.
There are also Medieval AUs but I'm not sure if there are public ones yet, so maybe someone can set up the first of those. I can tell you it would be really popular during Halloween. ;)
Would any of these work nowadays? I don't know. But there's unlikely to be anything lost in trying. The fact that the SSO OC events did well last year at least suggests that the interest and willingness is still there. Just need a good enough incentive, and just as importantly, a return on that engagement.
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