Fully agree. I see this sentiment so often, "we gotta tell people from reddit how great it is here!"
This might work with something like a meme community, but once it becomes a bit less mainstream you need people to make that decision themselves. It will look needy and annoying to try and "educate" them about how supposedly great it is here.
I agree with your disagreement. One of the biggest mistakes was folks trying to create 1:1 analogs of every subreddit. A single big community can have a lot of varied interesting discussions. If it gets too big, folks can get together and start a separate sub topic community for whatever topic warrants it.
Sometimes I've seen people complain about people using asklemmy for not askreddit style questions, but I actually think that's ok and I'm in favor of that as it means more discussion, content, and visibility.
Eventually asklemmy will reach "critical mass", and split into more niche communities.
Yup I've thought about this recently and I think the big problem is people expect Reddit when Reddit evolved over time. Here you have hundreds of subs existing where the user base doesnt match the need for it.
Use Canada as an example. I'm sure on Reddit Canada started first then as it grew the need for provinces and cities. Here we have Canada and I'm sure provinces and cities. Everyone should just be in Canada. When the user base grows it will naturally splinter to smaller like minded communities.
We are trying to rebuild the wheel when the wheel is not needed.