So you can hoin; it's just a different process you're not used to.

You can (ana maybe should) host your own lemmy instance and participate in the discussions.

On a related note, I tried to find an alternative to /r/nfl a few months ago, signed up for a good looking community, and am still waiting for manual admin approval apparently. It makes me wonder how many of these medium size forums are being killed by bots?

I'm a fairly heavy Reddit user and I've been musing on what I would lose if Reddit shut down. I came to the conclusion that /r/nfl and /r/knitting were far and away the leaders (and in fact otherwise it might be a net positive as I wasn't scrolling through rubbish for hours). There isn't another form of sports coverage that is as rapid and universal (I paid for The Athletic for a while and that was decent), and the knitting subreddit is constantly giving me project ideas and things to learn.

Good for signal, bad for scale.

I also went with kbin but I gotta say writing an essay to join someone's privately hosted service isn't a bad idea. This is what it was like when people were hosting servers on their personal phone lines.

If we want the internet to be federated, by the people, for the people yada yada, then this is what we'll have to get used to again. Big corps took it away for a while but do we really want their future?