That said, for a small overall community, I think the example of Reddit did the Threadiverse a disservice. Ideally, I think specialized communities should arise out of generalized ones, forking off when they start to clutter the general community or at least become self-sustaining conversations. Instead, a non-trivial percentage of subreddits was just plopped down with the welcome sign put out, but that caused users to assume that they shouldn't post a certain question in a general community, and made them not want to post it in the desert community that had been set up but had no traffic.

Fortunately, !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world seems to be doing okay, but I know I in particular wouldn't be annoyed to see questions outside my usual interests posted here.