Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment.

The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view)

Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added.

So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.