I’ve also been in the same boat but haven’t really given Lenny a shot because some of the instructions makes it unclear on where to go (federated, instances) for the experience I want.

I’ve genuinely been missing the “news” on communities I frequent. I’ve been spending way more time on HN, but it’s not the same when the specific communities arent represented here.

Genuinely curious on how your Lenny intro went.

Ditto on spending more time on HN, which is great for [semi-]serious discussions but not so great for bass guitar tabs and zelda totk autobuild recipes and japan travel advice.

When I search Lemmy, I see depressingly meager results like communities with only 23 members. That's smaller than my BBS days in the 1980s! I must be doing something wrong?

Nah, that's just the state of a new website and an age of internet that has been consumed by the top 100 sites, leaving scraps for the outskirts unless you look real deep. You go too niche on reddit and you'll find those triple digit communities as well with maybe one post a week at best.

Growth will be slow, and perhaps at some point previous browsers may become creators themselves to facilitate this.

It took me a while to understand Lemmy/Kbin but this is how I now think of it. ActivityPub is basically a tool for people to start clones. It's as if someone can just download the code and start running "reddit" on their own server. Their server then has it's own users and "subreddits".

This is where the ActivityPub comes in. It lets the server graft in foreign "subreddits" from other servers and work with foreign users. This is where the federation/defederating comes in.

Basically you want to join a server that has a server local community you like and that also has a good reputation amongst other servers in the fediverse.

Ultimately, the fediverse seems to be little more than not having to create a new account on every server. So picking your "home" server seems to be a little more important than the "pick a server, any server" hype.

Beyond that the main difference in servers is whether you prefer the lemmy or kbin user interface. (You can use kbin communities on lemmy and vice-versa)

I ended up signing up at programming.dev, and I have subscribed to a few communities on beehaw.org (much more established communities) and kbin.social. But so far it seems to all be tech related.