I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.

I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.

Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it's subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.

Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of "upvotes," you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍

Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉

I agree with you

Profit motive ruined Reddit so you’ve come to a place created by communist then get upset that the people who made and operate it are communists. Yeah that’s more than a little silly.

Created mine on feddit.de to get the german equivalent of Catastrophe as a username. And also because I live in Germany

To potential new users, also consider https://discuss.tchncs.de/ as Feddit gets hit really hard currently

They actually defederated with lemmy.world due to spam, kindof sucks, as users will miss out on communities on lemmy.world, lots of which were not spam.

yeah. i think the other problem is that people don't know if the instance would be good performance wise. i.e. i joined lemmy.ml because it was the one i found first.

A good way to handle it would be to have an instance list. with number of users vs maximum users. like joining a server in a video game. if i see its super full, i'll pick another server. of course, we'd need some large banners to make sure people know they won't be missing out on other instances.