I’ve already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances.
For science topics, mander.xyz has a lot of good ones set up, and !solarpunk@slrpnk.net on slrpnk.net has been great!
edit: for new users - you can type ! to begin autofilling a community, even for ones on other instances, like I did for the solarpunk community above. It may take a few seconds for the autofill results to show up if you have a slow connection like me.
While fine for me, I thnk this is going to be one of the bigger hurdles for newer users. It’s not the most obvious, really. I’m not sure what could help, maybe some bookmarklet exists to make it simpler to subscribe via the instance you’re using?
Completely agree, it’s a major pain point. I’ve opened some issues on Github around it. Reddit had a manifesto that joining communities should the easiest thing to do, and we need to do the same here.
Something very similar exists for Mastodon in the form of FediAct so it’s probably only a matter of time until someone makes a browser extension for Lemmy.