I subscribe to communities on multiple instances. My main activity is on our niche instance. If people are happy signing up at lemmy.world and limiting themselves to the communities available there, I see nothing wrong with that.

That being said, I think if you search lemmy.world for wetshaving, as an example, our instance does show up in the results because there is federated cross-over (for lack of a better term).

I signed up on a smaller instance and only follow a couple of communities there, so I had to go out and search for things I was interested in. I pretty much just subscribed to anything that sounded remotely interesting, figuring I could leave later.

i mostly found stuff with https://browse.feddit.de/ and https://lemmyverse.net/, as well as just going to the bigger instances and looking at the local lists for anything interesting. So I’m following communities across several of the larger severs - lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, kbin.social, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz - and a few smaller ones that sounded interesting or relevant. Also fedidb.org is a nice tool to see info about the fediverse in general, including stats on Lemmy and Kbin servers.

It only really matters for the “local” feed which instance you choose. I don’t really see much point to that one honestly, except if you’re on something like startrek.website where “local” is “show me all star trek stuff”, or something similar.

And yes, it is important to spread out the user base across multiple servers and not all end up on lemmy.world.

So I’d say find some smaller instance, maybe with a community actually physically local to you, and make that your main one. Or don’t and stay on lemmy.world, I’m not your dad.

Perpetual plug to my userscript which changes all links to point to your home instance to make this even easier :)

The idea is you can subscribe and interact with any instances, no matter what instance you came from

Sure, most will jump the bandwagon into lemmy.world… at least for the near future. I can say that with confidence because when you search “how to join Lemmy”, most guide will point you to Lemmy.world instead of… lets say… coughLemmynsfwcough

Over time, some will eventually move to other instance (mostly just the account, because they want ‘cool username’ for themselves). Sooner or later, things will balance themselves out.

Maybe you can even start by deploying your own instance, for no other reason than claiming your own ‘cool username’.

I’d argue one of the most pressing concerns right now is the lack of migration tools

Currently you can’t just create an account on instance X and move to Y. You need to create a new account. Eventually if we get the functionality to migrate from one place to another, people will be able to spread out across the fediverse and the risk of a single big server going belly up reduced.

From a technical standpoint if one instance gets defederated from other instances, all the users on that instance are stuffed. Their content won’t appear in the wider fediverse (so less engagement)

I generally scroll through either local or everything sorted by “New Comments”. That’s why I’m replying to this two month old post, because someone else did, so it rose to the top. Feels like a combination of Reddit and a classic forum where you’d have posts that would get bumped by activity.

We’re all figuring this out as we go! Since the great Reddit migration, we’ve already seen our first big drama with the Beehaw defederation. Some Beehaw users disagreed and left for other instances while users of other instances liked the move and joined Beehaw. The Lemmy fediverse is what WE make it for better or for worse.