When I mean a small server, I mean one of the top 20, which at least a few hundred users.

As I said elsewhere, with a few hundreds users, the chance of you stumbling upon a community that nobody else subscribes to is that either the community is dead, or it just started, or indeed it is very niche.

The only case where you want discussions from the start is the last case, which is very less likely to happen once your instance reaches a few thousands users (which is the scenario most of the people hope once we spread more evenly).