I’m a fairly new users, but I feel that navigating around the fediverse is a bit cumbersome, maybe the wrong word for it. But there is a lack of overview in a way. I enjoy being on this server, but I also like to follow other communities. Lots of different topics, everything from cars to Linux to architecture.
Right now there are 10 (that I could find on browse.feddit.de) instances named Linux on different server. So the small number of Linux users using some fediverse instance is spread around over many servers. Coming from reddit, things were far from perfect over there, but there is only r/Linux. It’s a shame users are spread so thin all over the place.
I used Linux as an example, I’ve seen the same “problem” for other topics as well. Anyways, just my perspective as a new users. Hope this wasn’t too much of a rant, maybe we can look at this as an issue where the fediverse can improve.
Niche communities will organically begin to congregate in one or two places in the fediverse over time. It won’t happen instantly. The same thing happened over at Reddit, but they’ve had almost 2 decades for it to happen, and communities are still fragmented there. Just look at r/gaming, r/games, r/pcgaming, etc. It’s no different on the fediverse, the only difference is that these communities might share a name. So instead of having r/gaming and r/games, you have two communities both named c/gaming.
For now, what I do is search for the community I’m interested (i.e. Linux in your example), take a look at the number of users subscribed to each option and pick the largest one as my main source. If I find the quality of that community to be lacking, I check out the other ones as well.