I mean yeah... though they can still troll you by calling out slurs from the safety of the instances that they control. We have to have a thick skin here. How this relates to the OP though is that not everyone is willing to subject themselves to such, hence leave. That is one way to "move away from the shitty communities/instances", by simply leaving entirely.:-P.

Ƿell ſpoken!

It's not your fault, the tools for community discovery are exceedingly poor on Lemmy (this is one arena where PieFed really shines, having virtually solved that issue). Sorting communities by total rather than active users preferentially highlights those that died off 3+ years ago after the Rexodus waned, rather than the most highly active ones currently, which is the polar opposite of what would be most helpful.

And then sorting posts by All as people keep recommending will by definition not show those communities that are not posted to on practically a daily basis. Thus we can have meme and comics communities here, but to have such discussion communities is exceedingly difficult due to the network effect, even among those of us already here.

About tankies: I really have no desire to keep bringing it up over and over and over again, farming the downvotes that result each time. Rather I was saying that this, after the network effect, is the top response that I see on Reddit as to why they refuse to come here. i.e. I'm not spreading my own opinion here - just block people and move on, you know - I'm reporting a diagnosis as to how we can, or rather are blocked from, moving forward.

Indeed though, things change. I would argue the principle of inertia in that they do not simply change all on their own, but rather as a result of effort. Reddit had something to offer - an experience that was superior to what came before. But the experiences here are not superior: over the years there have been network timeouts, whole instances up and disappear (e.g. lemm.ee), the content is for the most part not here, and that network effect is truly real.

And the network effect and the name recognition of Twitter (X) and 4chan works for them. It does not (seem to?) work for Lemmy. I dunno, you could try to go to that subreddit and others like it and explain what Lemmy has to offer? They might ban you but then it would have been tried.

As for me I am still learning - e.g. I did not know until a few days ago about https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/. This seems like kind-of a game changer to me⁉️ Now I want to know: why don't people recommend programming.dev more often? Do they, like me, not know about this? Surely many do not want this kind of curation to be performed for them, even though it is easily reversed? (At least, I think it is? I don't really know... perhaps I need to make an account and find out? or find a hidden community on my own instance to test that out?)

It is not only community discovery that is so poor on Lemmy, it is also knowledge of how such things work - especially hidden communities. (De-)Federations have their own list and people have talked about them extensively over the years, whereas the concept of hidden communities has no such public exposure, either in Lemmy or PieFed. And if even we who have been here and at least a quarter paying attention to matters as they came out don't know, then I certainly cannot blame Redditors for not knowing either.

It is also extremely frustrating that the pace of feature development is measured in significant fractions of a decade rather than more quickly, especially when Redditors already have access to so much such as user & post flairs, polls, multi-communities, notifications sent upon moderation events, a modmail (who is a Threadiverse user supposed to ask when their content is removed why that was done - are they supposed to simply DM each one and see who responds?), and posts that are not "deleted" but instead remain active & accessible to anyone with the URL, so that discussions began in them can finish despite the moderator's decision to no longer platform the post in the subreddit's community feed listing. PieFed has most of these things btw, while Lemmy lacks all of them, and it strongly looks like that situation will largely continue for the next 5-10 years.

What happened to Stack Overflow is happening here too. People come here less and less often, as the reasons to do so decrease alongside each user that flees from here. It would be nice to see this trend reversed. Which means attracting some new users and moreover retaining existing ones - not at the scale of millions but if the goal was to at least to retain an even distribution then at the scale of tens of thousands?

Your instance apparently hides much of the toxicity from you: https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/.

As you say, when you leave the instance and view those others you can see notable differences in what they have to offer. Like mander.xyz is primarily science based.

I don't know if I can precisely explain all the nuances of why people on Reddit complain about us here the way that they do. Like how much of that is based upon prior experiences, which may have changed in the meantime? Or maybe they say toxicity but really mean the network effect where there is so little niche content? Perhaps they simply misunderstand entirely the nature of federated content, so that yes while e.g. hexbear exists that does not mean that all of its content is readily accessible from every other instance?

Part of the problem lies in how poor discoverability is in the Lemmy and even PieFed software. Like the above link explains in depth precisely which communities are hidden by the admins of your instance, however I recall having to stumble upon discovery of this fact on StarTrek.website where there were zero posts or public acknowledgement that ChapoTrapHouse had been made "hidden", when it previously had not been. Lemmy and PieFed each show the list of entirely defederated instances, which is quite a long listing on programming.dev, but there is no central place showing which communities are "hidden" in this manner (nor in PieFed either).

So how then are people supposed to know the facts? Even if people take the time to investigate their findings will depend upon the method used to search - e.g. here is an example comment showing someone on hexbear.net contributing to i.e. appearing on programming.dev - so is the latter "cut off" from the former or no? The answer is "yes but really no", although probably more accurately stated as "no but really yes" (or if we want higher levels of precision then perhaps "no but really yes but at the end of the day no"?). It's confusing AF even for us here on the Threadiverse who know what's going on - like when ChapoTrapHouse was removed from StarTrek.website I was very surprised, bc I had previously interacted in that very community, so I KNEW that it was possible... until it was not anymore. Also, defederations leave up old content as well, even while preventing the influx of new content.

So I do not blame others for failing to understand all of these nuances and complexities? If there were a webpage similar to the federation listings that showed hidden communities, that would have done so much to guide people to understand that particular matter? As it is though, the topic requires in-depth investigation into the ever-changing set of documentation maintained by every instance individually. Speaking of, your instance has a broken link in its sidebar text referring to a wiki site that does not work, returning a cloudflare page saying "Invalid SSL certificate".

Lemmy can be - i.e. has corners that are - toxic as fuck. There are walls between such now, but they are not well-known or documented, and I do not blame Redditors in the slightest for not being aware of this.