So far I like it. It was a little odd signing up because I would find an instance to sign up on and kept scrolling until I found a join button which looped me back to the list of instances. Or I would click on the "you must log in or sign up to comment " message on a thread hoping I could sign up that way and getting sent to the instance lists. I didn't understand to join the instance I needed to hit join from a drop down menu at the top of the page, until I tried looking there since the other options didn't work.

I was doing that through the website on mobile browser. Now that I have an account I am running it through Jerboa. It works well so far, I'm just learning how to find communities to subscribe to, and I'm not sure if when I search from the search options in Jerboa if I'm getting all possible results or just certain ones my instance is somehow connected to? From other comments it sounds like it's the latter and I'm not sure how to get around that.

Other than the learning curve I like it so far. I'm trying to migrate here from Reddit and someone there recommended I try this.

It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.

So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That's very limiting.

Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.

I like that it’s still so small. None of this karma farming just diluting from high quality content and conversations

The app I'm using (Jerboa) is a bit lacking, but I'm sure it'll improve. I'm unsure about how accounts work with the servers, can I migrate my account if the server I am using shuts down? Communities are tiny and a lot are missing, but I'm sure those will grow and fill in as more people join.