One way I found making it so the community looks active and getting those followers is by going to global activity, and following everyone on there.
If you need to host files with a direct link but can't find anything that's simple, I recommend going to catbox. It's a really awesome site where you don't need an account and you can automatically get direct links. Only downside is that it changes the name to a random string and you can't upload .exes. But you could always just use a zip file.