It's not your fault, the tools for community discovery are exceedingly poor on Lemmy (this is one arena where PieFed really shines, having virtually solved that issue). Sorting communities by total rather than active users preferentially highlights those that died off 3+ years ago after the Rexodus waned, rather than the most highly active ones currently, which is the polar opposite of what would be most helpful.

And then sorting posts by All as people keep recommending will by definition not show those communities that are not posted to on practically a daily basis. Thus we can have meme and comics communities here, but to have such discussion communities is exceedingly difficult due to the network effect, even among those of us already here.

About tankies: I really have no desire to keep bringing it up over and over and over again, farming the downvotes that result each time. Rather I was saying that this, after the network effect, is the top response that I see on Reddit as to why they refuse to come here. i.e. I'm not spreading my own opinion here - just block people and move on, you know - I'm reporting a diagnosis as to how we can, or rather are blocked from, moving forward.

Indeed though, things change. I would argue the principle of inertia in that they do not simply change all on their own, but rather as a result of effort. Reddit had something to offer - an experience that was superior to what came before. But the experiences here are not superior: over the years there have been network timeouts, whole instances up and disappear (e.g. lemm.ee), the content is for the most part not here, and that network effect is truly real.

And the network effect and the name recognition of Twitter (X) and 4chan works for them. It does not (seem to?) work for Lemmy. I dunno, you could try to go to that subreddit and others like it and explain what Lemmy has to offer? They might ban you but then it would have been tried.

As for me I am still learning - e.g. I did not know until a few days ago about https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/. This seems like kind-of a game changer to me⁉️ Now I want to know: why don't people recommend programming.dev more often? Do they, like me, not know about this? Surely many do not want this kind of curation to be performed for them, even though it is easily reversed? (At least, I think it is? I don't really know... perhaps I need to make an account and find out? or find a hidden community on my own instance to test that out?)

It is not only community discovery that is so poor on Lemmy, it is also knowledge of how such things work - especially hidden communities. (De-)Federations have their own list and people have talked about them extensively over the years, whereas the concept of hidden communities has no such public exposure, either in Lemmy or PieFed. And if even we who have been here and at least a quarter paying attention to matters as they came out don't know, then I certainly cannot blame Redditors for not knowing either.

It is also extremely frustrating that the pace of feature development is measured in significant fractions of a decade rather than more quickly, especially when Redditors already have access to so much such as user & post flairs, polls, multi-communities, notifications sent upon moderation events, a modmail (who is a Threadiverse user supposed to ask when their content is removed why that was done - are they supposed to simply DM each one and see who responds?), and posts that are not "deleted" but instead remain active & accessible to anyone with the URL, so that discussions began in them can finish despite the moderator's decision to no longer platform the post in the subreddit's community feed listing. PieFed has most of these things btw, while Lemmy lacks all of them, and it strongly looks like that situation will largely continue for the next 5-10 years.

What happened to Stack Overflow is happening here too. People come here less and less often, as the reasons to do so decrease alongside each user that flees from here. It would be nice to see this trend reversed. Which means attracting some new users and moreover retaining existing ones - not at the scale of millions but if the goal was to at least to retain an even distribution then at the scale of tens of thousands?