Starting a new thread named "TEA" anywhere within Dave's forum is pointless to me. As long as I haven't been pointed there, and as long as I didn't leave at least one post there in reaction, it won't show up in the "Show new replies to your posts" view. This particular view is the one I'm using 90% or more of the time here, and sometime I have a look at "Show unread threads since last visit", and low posting frequency threads can take quite a long time to show up when I'm occasionally looking there.
It happens rarely (once or twice a year) that I browse through the topics. So this is the way the TEA thread worked (or ATM still works) for me, and the groups.io does work in a similar way by dumping all new messages into my inbox, regardless of topic, hashtag, thread or whatever. If I see something interesting, I might jump in, usually I don't care the topic at all - this works fine for already on-topic threads that I occasionally jump into here at Dave's. And it works the way it worked (and I really liked that way) with the TEA thread. It may happen the posting frequency with this method of following a forum or thread gets too high, this wasn't the case for me at the TEA thread. If that happens, I look for methods to organize my method of following, but won't complain to the owner/moderators, since they don't force that on me.
Otherwise, if some authority (e.g. at work) forces me (or expects me) to gather daily information from many places (like email, chat, video conferences, collaboration places, file shares) but isn't able to present that in a way that I can digest, I start complaining loudly, or if that doesn't work, ignoring most of the incoming information - what is really important will be repeated in a more directed way. But this doesn't apply to places that I like to visit during some spare time.
just my 0.05 (Euro cents)