So I just started with the fediverse, I heard about it for years, but never did the real jump to go full in. For now I started with lemmy because it seems to be the easiest option. I wanted to do a small recap of tip, tricks and general usage flow.
When choosing a instance you take in account that a big one already has more communities synced so when searching on the community more will appear, also when using "ALL" on main page it will have more content. But smaller instances could run faster because they have less load.
-To search new communities use the "communities" tab in your instance or any other instance. Because different instances have different synced communities it can yield different results. Also use any of these links: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
There are more but I lost the links :p, pls add them in comments
-To improve experience when browsing this script seems mandatory: https://lemm.ee/post/530162 It seems that by default when opening a post it will go to the original instance, that has the disadvantage that you don't have an account there, so you actually need to open it on your instance, the script helps because it rewrites URL's to your instance.
-Still I need to find an easy way to open externally things in my instance. Lets say I find by another way a post or just a friend sends me a link to another post/community, then I will need to open it on my instance. This is as easy as to pick the last part of the url after the domain and copy paste it into my instance. Then I will need to add a slash followed by an @ and then the domain name of the instance. This will allow me to open it. But that is a slow tedious way to do it. If anyone knows a better way it would help. Maybe I could write a simple script to detect any lemmy instance and do it for me?? But want to know if its already done.
-For daily usage similar to reddit (after following a bunch of communities) just go to main page and press on "POSTS" and "SUBSCRIBED", just scroll down mindless like reddit. For an r/popular and r/all just use "ALL" button.
-I'm not using kbin directly because it seems to be more rough and less polished software, the UI is harder and because it has mciroblogin (so connection to mastodon and others) it seems to be harder to use.
-Finally it seems that lemmy can only read lemmy and kbin posts. I like this because it simplifies the UI and the purpose of the network seems to be more simple. There are other fediverse services that can communicate between them. For example gnu/social, mastodon and plemora seem to be different software/services. But they are similar in being microblogs (like twitter copy) so they can communicate easily between them). For now I'm still deciding which one I want as main. I used to use gnu/social a few years ago with an instance called quitter but is was closed after some time and lost interest in it.