My view is that the design of this site, targeted at niche users, is not alienating because it is designed by people from the same niche. It's great for that purpose much like niche tools like git or whatever are for people in the right niche, but I don't think you can apply this strategy when designing something that needs to have mass appeal for its business model to work.

The success of this website is that it doesn't have to be successful along the same metrics as substack or reddit or tiktok to fulfill its purpose.