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.
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.