You also make some fair points but I would change the wording a bit. Instead of “THE” most active instance, pick ones that are AMONG the list of the most active. These two that Blaze mentioned were chosen with exactly that in mind by starting from the top 20 and eliminating those run only by a single admin, or have database corruption issues, or have names that could be off-putting to some (shit works yo dawg), or other themes (ranging from tankies to LGBTQIA+ to Star Trek, or region specificity like feddit.uk is a great instance but most people from e.g. the USA, or Australia or such may not feel fully at home there, unlike Discuss.Online that while it is based in the USA does not really have that anywhere as its “theme”).

And having the “most” content is a VERY loaded concept. Lemmy.ml for instance is defederated from no major large instances (it is how instances retrieve the list of all communities across the Fediverse), and yet those admins are notorious for banning people from communities that they have never even heard of, much less visited or commented in. (Edit: also several other reasons too, another big one is how its default sort method is Local rather than All, thus a visitor without an Account or knowledge of how to switch that yet will see primarily the most highly charged tankie shit, and none of the wonderful content from elsewhere across the Fediverse like the memes from [email protected].) So I don’t think directing people to it is the right way to go. And now similarly to Lemmy.World for its own controversial stance, as per their announcement that was so poorly received, possibly merely bc of being poorly explained, that every word is struck through.

And I cannot in good conscience recommend hexbear.net either. Neither can many hexbears themselves btw - you can read more here. Therefore by extension I personally refuse to recommend instances that even federate with hexbear, bc their trolling is THAT onerous to an uninitiated newbie who is not aware of such. Which is why I petitioned Discuss.Online to block it first. TLDR: yes I want ALL of the content across the Fediverse, subject to the constraint that it is offered in good faith. But I don’t want to be constantly trolled, nor will I recommend that experience to others either. The can choose it for themselves if they wish, I’m just talking about my own response here.

Also, Beehaw has cut itself off from the largest instances including Lemmy.World. So that’s another reason why it does not follow from “largest instance” (i.e. the one with the largest number of user accounts) that it will have the most content, or be the most reliable one. The one with the most content and highest reliability mixture is surely lemm.ee, though with so very many honorable mentions there that could easily rise to the top given the slightest of tie-breakers, like lemmy.dbzer0.com is damn impressive as well. But the one that seems most geared towards (I mean best matchup to, as in not speaking to intentionality but it certainly does work) “mainstream normies”, particularly centrists coming from Reddit i.e. quite a bit more right-leaning compared to the rest of the world and so would be highly turned off by all the “kill all landlords” content here (and yet we still want to help these people get away from Huffman and Musk… don’t we? To clarify I do NOT mean Alt-Right MAGAT extremists, as the opposite of our own Alt-Left tankie extremists here, just centrists is all, which is like 90-99% of all human beings on the planet) seems like Discuss.Online. And then also sopuli.xyz for generic, possibly also former Redditors, but based in Europe and therefore wanting ever so slightly a different experience including network latency and governmental rules where the server is based.

IMO this is a downside of Lemmy and should be fixed. All instances should have a list of all the communities other federated instances have. It would significantly improve the search functionality.

https://lemmy-federate.com/ ?

There is such a web resource but I haven’t bookmarked it and couldn’t easily find it offhand so I will leave that to you to do, but I do keep seeing it pop up in various discussions like this so it won’t be terribly difficult to find - it’s very likely mentioned in this exact post already:-).

There are multiple meanings to “discoverability”, one being how a new user coming from let’s say Reddit or X finds content to consume. This is where PieFed’s Categories of Communities really shines through, the chief alternatives on Lemmy being sorting by All, or communities where new communities are discussed, or the aforementioned webpage. Every solution has its disadvantages as well as advantages, e.g. PieFed’s Categories require admin approval to change, though custom user-defined collections are being discussed to be added to the 2025 Roadmap. Still, Categories of Communities existing in the first place is already a huge step ahead, compared to Lemmy, in that one narrow regard. And yes, on PieFed someone can also still sort by All.:-) The best solution that I have heard of that comes close to such topic collections is to have multiple accounts possibly across multiple instances and use each one for a different purpose - like News, Memes, Technology, Movies, Science, Programming, etc. What a pain… but it does work, according to Blaze who does it.

And the second as you stated well is the interconnection between PieFed and Lemmy, plus also Mbin, Sublinks, and some people (not me!!) may say Threads too, plus perhaps more besides in the future, and also perhaps Mastodon, Friendica, and other services altogether besides. I highly doubt that the Lemmy developers, the same ones who run lemmy.ml, are going to care about such - they made a Reddit replacement for themselves, and that’s all they really wanted. If someone wants differently, then it’s up to others to make that happen on their own. But who knows, I could be wrong:-). Then again, just how much do leftist extremists want to hear from the Alt-Right MAGATs on Reddit? :-P

Not everyone wants to maximize the amount of people using the Fediverse. And in particular these kinds of across-instance collaboration tools are the least well developed parts of Lemmy, e.g. right now reports are not even federated to a mod on some other instance than where the community is located (although this is planned for possibly as soon as 0.19.20).

Beehaw has defederated from Lemmy.World btw, and Lemmy.World has defederated from hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Lemmy.ml is defederated from none of the largest instances, so ironically it likely has the largest collection of communities, despite how many people routinely get banned from that instance despite never having even visited those communities or even heard about them before. One rule for thee, while a different one for me… the ultimate authoritian communist mantra. Still, so long as instances are too afraid to defederate from it, that fact (that it has the most comprehensive listing of communities across the Fediverse) will remain true.