The official Lemmy website is a pile of steaming poo too, which is the first thing I looked at. It looks amateur and the way the recommended instances list reads and looks isn’t very reassuring at all.

It looks like they’ve made some changes but it still looks like an impenetrable thing for nerds rather than the new wave of social media.

ending with a specific instance that aligns with that user’s interests

Uh oh. The guides I read said the instance doesn’t matter, just pick one! Then you subscribe to communities from any instance you stumble across to build up your “page” of stuff to consume. Is that not what we’re doing? I thought I had this worked out haha