I think my advice is the same as it was for new Mastodon transplants a few months ago: follow a lot, prune a lot.

Communities will come and go. Don't get discouraged your first week trying to figure everything out. I'd follow a bunch of communities and just prune them out later if your home timeline is getting out of hand.

I'm still trying to figure out the whole Fediverse thing. I kind of get the impression that at this point, the expectation is that one ~~ring will rule them all~~ community will end up becoming the most popular if there are many communities that cover the same topic. I hope that works. Because until it does, there will be a bunch of tiny little communities with small groups of members who are isolated from each other.

A lot of people have suggested using https://browse.feddit.de to find popular communities

Use this link to see which communities exist across instances: https://browse.feddit.de/

It would be nice to automatically generate a sidebar of other instances that cover the same topic in the magazine/subreddit of your home instance that you’re currently browsing, because right now if I want to follow “gaming” as a general topic outside the kbin.social magazine, I have to search for it manually on those other instances or find someone from my home instance who posted a comment with the address to that topic in the external instance.

I’m sure each site has its own priorities right now, but a more streamlined search method for topics/interests would be awesome.

Also, dog

I spun up an instance of Calckey to see how well it plays and pulls in content from Beehaw. It feels kind of hit or miss. I wish there was a tool that federated really nicely with multiple platforms.

I’d love something that would allow easy browsing of lemmy content and a nice interface for just sharing photos and text. Calckey seems almost there but lemmy content just seems to randomly trickle in the main feed and it’s not very organized. The project is a small team so it’s understandable.