I'm one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.
I'm not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.
I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there.....and that's it.
But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?
I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?
You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there's one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that's where I'm subscribing.
How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?
It is likely that most users will end up on a few big instances. That's not inherently bad, but it can be an issue if those instances have poor moderation.
You'll be able to see content from any instance that isn't defederated from your instance. The main thing this means right now is that you can't see new stuff posted to beehaw. Beehaw defederated lemmy.world and shitjustworks because of high moderation load due to open signups on those instances leading to a lot of troll users coming from them. They may refederate later when moderation tools for the platform improve or if those instances get more of a handle on the trolls, or they may not.
Since there are some big established communities on beehaw, you might benefit from having an account on an instance that is not defederated from them. Or you might not, if those specific communities don't interest you.
A quiet instance is fine (great, even), as long as it's federated with the busier instances that have the content you want to see. The best place on the fediverse is
In terms of which communities I join, most communities aren't that active yet, so I'm joining all the ones that look remotely interesting. If the volume gets to be too much as the userbase grows, I'll drop the ones that aren't as fun/interesting.
One thing to note is that when you search from within your instance, the "subscriber" account for communities on other instances doesn't necessarily reflect the total population of subscribers, you'd need to click through to that instance to see the real number I think.
Also, since the total userbase is small relative to reddit, folks are going to be pooling more in general communities rather than specific ones. So for example, you might actually find more xbox related content in the general "gaming" community at Beehaw (20k subscribers) or the one at lemmy.ml (11k subscribers).