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?
tl;dr: don't make a community on your own instance unless you intend for it to be a divergent population or discussion from one that already exists.
I'm going to disagree with you on this point. Communities of (nominally) identical purpose probably shouldn't exist in an ideal fediverse. Because these communities are not linked it fractures the user base and/or requires a great deal more work on the human side to manage. Example: 3 communities about Akron, Ohio. If you want to know what's happening in Akron, you have to subscribe to, and manage, three distinct community feeds. Participants won't all be subscribed, so people with interest in the dog park on one community won't get input from people who have dogs on other communities. If I want to put up a flyer for my band which is giving away free beer for coming to our show at the city festival, I have to put it up on all three communities separately and then monitor all three threads for activity.
Alternatively, the ability to create alternate communities of the same focus is not a necessarily a bug. If I'm on an instance which hates beer and dogs, I would want to create an Akron community where I don't have to hear about those drunkards parading their precious fur babies around town like the own the place. I can say all the negative things I want to about beer or dogs while discussing important festival events like the goldfish-bowl-pingpong-ball vendor who always has the most vibrantly colored fish stacked in their prize bags.
While this is a made up example, there are two reddit subs for the game Elite Dangerous and it's the best for the two player bases because they have split along the lines of PVP/Seal Clubbing and Co-op/world generation and, generally, fucking hate one another. That's a good reason to have split instances here on the fediverse.