I think the subreddit had the advantage of being connected to reddit as a whole and as a result had orders of magnitude more people wandering into it. Those people had other interests besides politics, but they were already on reddit so r/CTH being niche wasn't much of an impediment. Here I believe we'll probably need to cater to more interests than just politics to attract more users.

It's like how a forum about [insert extremely niche hobby here] will attract a small, niche userbase, but a general topic forum with a bit of a focus on that same hobby can basically take in anyone. This is essentially how reddit, a forum that was originally pretty much just tech people, got so big via the subreddit system. I think right now we lean a bit too close to the extremely niche hobby forum side of things considering how our particular brand of leftism on this site isn't too common.

I'm not saying we need to get politics out of our video games and stop talking about twitter, but that we should talk more about our other interests and hobbies so people come here for the non-reactionary userbase and stay for the communities surrounding their interests.

That's much easier said than done of course, with such a small userbase to start with it might be an insurmountable problem. But certainly a little can be done here and there to keep the site from bleeding users faster than it gains them.