There is also a third way of going about it and is to "hire locally". By locally I don't mean in your town, but I mean in your community. The Hive community is a global community that is also, for the most part, taken by real humans. So strengthen your relationship with them might also produce a sense of community.
Is funny how since the boom of AI (but even since Siri) a lot of people have grown attached to their digital partner. Making into a real life partner. Even Elon Musk turned Grok into a nice Waifu.
I'm not suggesting to marry a Hivian, but there are many under-utilized tools to reach Hivians that I found it funny why not more people try to connect beyond the blogs and the communities. There are some Hive-driven podcasts on Discord, (although I wish it was done on 3Speak instead), there are also activities like the one in my Anime Realm Group which take place weekly.
I think that building tools like a Hive-driven Zoom (this would have been possible back in the days with @hivestreams or @vimm). But there are also tools like Hive-Tube by @kencode to monetize streaming media. So a good setup and some open source service like mumble could make it so you have a video platform to say hi to everyone in the community and go from there.
I think there are many like-minded people online, and if they are available, you can share, connect and build together. There are so many projects that need attention and learning to code and promoting new tech is always needed and appreciated. Just take a look at Hive Projects and see how many things have been built or purposed that you can take over or even hire a team to revive or rebrand.
You can argue that you can't afford devs, but there are so many college kids that are looking for projects and will work for very little money. Sure it will not be the best quality code, but it can be way better than whatever you can produce, and the community might be very grateful for your contribution and even reward you with real money that can pay for a proper dev salary.