Maybe go to !forums@sh.itjust.works and ask where you can find external replacement communities if you can’t find them on the fediverse?
Also, within the fediverse, if you use Mbin, PieFed or Friendica, you can easily use hashtags to broaden the covered topics while an equivalent community doesn’t get made. Just avoid hashtag spam within a same post, please.
And lastly, any project is just as successful as the people involved are interested in building it. The fediverse is a niche within a niche, and neither Reddit grew overnight, its advantage being to be much older. And since Reddit seems hellbent both on self-sabotaging and monitoring people down to their criminal and medical records (exhaggeration but who knows for how long), it may be a good idea to be proactive about building and growing alternatives, instead of feeding Stockholm syndrome for Reddit.






Healthy growth is exponential, so while an initial growth may seem like near zero, as it gains traction, it should become visible.
Also if the fediverse is indeed smaller than those it competes against (can’t audit numbers, can’t trust them), thus making the potential users interested in a given topic, still spreading word of the communities or at least their posts elsewhere, like chatrooms, may help bringing people in.