I just made a Piefed.social account today. I’m very familiar with reddit, but after the API changes and all the bullshit that’s been happening with the site lately I want something different. How do I see which communities I’m a part of, the equivalent of subreddits I guess? Where do I go to find new ones? Do I need to be in a singe instance to participate? I’d really like to find the Lemmy equivalent of my favorite subreddits from reddit, but I simply don’t know how to do that.
When I’m on my home instance (piefed.social for you I suppose), I see a list of subscribed communities on the sidebar. I think you can go into your profile and see as well. I used to just look at someplace like https://lemmyverse.net/communities to find new communities, but I don’t know what the goto is now, it’s been awhile since I’ve looked.
One weakness/strength of the fediverse is that it’s not a single point of failure. By that I mean reddit might just nuke /r/foobar and it’s all gone. The fediverse may break up that single community into several, ie [email protected], [email protected], foobar@whateverhost. Now you have 3 or more communities discussing foobar, but they aren’t linked. The weakness is that they aren’t linked and can split the userbase. The strength is that if the owner of lemmy.world fucks off and their server disappeared, the other choices are still there. If you find <hobby or interest>@skism.net, but there only are a handful of people and 3 posts over the past 6 months, you may find the same <hobby or interest>@another.com that has a super active userbase.
It can be a little annoying at first, if you are used to reddit and 10k people commenting stupid shit all over the place, most of Lemmy you’ll usually find 10s or 100s of people commenting stupid shit. It’s worth it for me, and I haven’t opened reddit in over a year. Your mileage may vary.