Hope this is a relevant ~~sub~~ Community to post this in.
I've made an account on Lemmy.world and downloaded Boost for Lemmy. Trying to wrap my head around a few things. I've read the Welcome all new users and Reddit refugees! post as well as this Beginner's Guide for Redditors, but I'm still left with some questions/criticisms.
Firstly when it comes to finding communities...
I've tried 3 recommended methods for finding replacement communities but they're all very inconsistent. As an example, /r/Android.
sub.rehab would have me believe lemdro.id/c/android is the main/biggest successor. lemmy.world isn't even mentioned, ".ml" looks like it's the 2nd biggest.
Searching within .world gives all 3 results but the number of subscribers in lemdro.id and .ml are way under reported.
Searching on feddit lemdro.id and .ml don't even come up.
For any given topic/interest, I could end up in a dead community while thinking it's the main place, depending on which search I use.
It's really frustrating to find communities this way. And I don't want to add 3+ communities that are the topic because I'll end up sometimes having the same article posted 3 times in my feed.
Secondly... Links to other instances
So in the guide by amirzaidi, it says take the link you've been sent and paste it into the search bar. But I've tried this with a random post from .ml and lemmy.world came back with nothing.
I could manually change the url and append it to the end of lemmy.world but that's not a good longterm solution. Maybe someone will build a browser extension that intercepts that url from another instance but the dev would have to keep on top of every time someone spins up a new instance.
I think the "big picture" idea of federated social media/reddit alternative is great, but in practice is seems too fragmented to actually work in a usable way for most people. I'm relatively tech savvy and will give it a solid few months while inital growing pains are worked out, but as it is at the moment I just don't know if I can see it taking off. In fact the only way I can really see it working for the masses is if one instance gets so big it "becomes" lemmy for most.
The concept of "official" community doesn't make any sense and should be ignored despite what some might try to sell you and feels as if the proponents of such wording are implying that there's some trademark on Reddit community names, which is again stupid. A community having a Reddit mod or two isn't necessarily more "official" than another that has mods who were never Reddit mods, it's a stupid argument advanced mostly by Reddit mods who want to preserve the same role on the Fediverse. Being a mod on Reddit is not a spectacular achievement that you should put on your resume. r/neovim tried to make their "official" community on the Fediverse instead of just telling their members to join an existing one, pushing the same arguments, but fast forward 3 months later their instance is dead (literally, the server is offline), because neovim communities on sopuli and programming.dev without Reddit mods succeeded instead.
And you are right in that the top communities right now are not modded by Reddit mods (and hence hilariously not designated as "official" by those who still subscribe to the Reddit ideology).
Also on the fragmentation "issue", it's a false problem to begin with. Lemmy is not a Reddit replacement, it's multiple Reddit replacements, some specialized and some very general, that are federated together in the sense that you can interact with the communities of some "Reddit" from a different "Reddit". Think of it as a big network of web forums, except that you don't need to create an account on every forum.
More choice adds maybe to the confusion of people who still wrongly expect Lemmy to be one single big Reddit replacement, but more choice is still healthy and I'm glad there are many communities out there even around seemingly similar subjects. One example is that I don't like the automated episode posts in [email protected] (but many others like them), so I'm glad to still have other anime communities like [email protected] despite it being smaller.
More choice is better and you don't risk having mods with too much power and be the only ones dictating how you should spend your time on Lemmy if their communities were the only ones around particular themes.
How you should go about Lemmy: Forget about trying to reproduce the exact same experience as on Reddit. Join an instance that you vibe with (also be wary of the fact that small instances, while potentially fast, have also the associated risk of maybe shutting down someday, as some have already died, and on the other hand big instances while they may have big resources they are usually bigger targets for DDOS attacks, so make your choice while taking that into account). Look at c/all. Look at the profiles of the frequent posters and see where they are active and join those communities if you vibe with them. The rest will come to you by itself.
Also for discovery, use https://lemmyverse.net with the "smart ranking" enabled.
If you have no idea where to start, you can subscribe to generic communities like asklemmy (both on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, both are really good), [email protected], and of course [email protected] (👀).
Completely fair point. I know a lot of reddit mods get too attached, it becomes too big a part of their self identity etc. When I found the sub.rehab site I didn't think too hard about it. At first glance it just seemed to fill my needs. I will try the lemmyverse search. 2 of 3 comments on this post recommended it. What's funny is that I found the 3 I've already tried by trying to read sticky/pinned posts to answer my questions before making my own post!
The fragmentation thing I'll just have to adjust to. I actually miss the days of forums. You can still find and entire forum for your 2003 car for example with limitless knowledge on it (unless it was all photobucket based...). Anything is better than Discord (grumble).
On reddit (and I know you said not to try and replicate it but I don't think that applies here) I was never much interested in memes, shitposting, /r/all etc. I subscribe to a sub for all my hobbies (gaming, snowboarding, my sports teams etc) and that's about it.