Discovery really has been the biggest drawback for me. The r/system combined with wikis and sidebars made it very easy to find interesting things.

That's lacking in lemmy so far. Which, it isn't a bad thing, barriers to entry have benefits. But from a user perspective, trying to replace reddit, the difficulty in navigating and finding things is frustrating.

But I'm coming from reddit, and they aren't meant to be the same. The issues are part of what makes it next to impossible for what happened there to happen in a federated system. And I'm so fucking sick of corporate bullshit ruining good things . I figure that lemmy will catch up in feature parity soon enough, and there's bound to be apps that make it easier to use at some point.

I just wish I had the resources to run a server myself.

I'm still figuring out how to properly navigate lemmy in general, so I'm a week or two from being ready to moderate more than the "emergency" sub me and an fellow user set up for edc. But once I get more settled in, I'll volunteer :)

To me, that's the entire point of lemmy. You guys are doing what you want, and letting the rest of us play in your sandbox. It's on us to play nicely, bring our own pails, and not poop in the sand.

You guys here, and at all of the instances I've run across, have gone out of your way to give us r/efugees a landing pad. I've received nothing but welcoming assistance at every turn, even when I've vented about the learning curve . What more could I ask for?

Okay, here's how I explained it to my kid.

You've got the united states, that's lemmy.

You've got states, which are instances. Servers are the roads inthem ,and the things that keep the roads working.

Communities are cities.

Kbin is Canada. Mastadon is France, where they do things weird, but they're working on the same basic principles.

The fediverse is the UN.

It ain't exactly right, but it ain't exactly wrong :)