I joined sh.itjust.works during the third party app debacle with reddit. I was using it for a while then stopped. So I went back and started using it again and was surprised how little has changed. I feel like the momentum for lemmy kind of surged then faded a bit mirroring my own personal usage so many others must have done the same. After browsing around I found differences in the posts that appear when browsing on sh.itjust.works vs lemmy.world. I couldn’t see any reason why this would happen as all the fixes I came across from a year or two ago are already turned on in my settings.

Second the ability to discover communities is still difficult. The old site I had used before was gone so I used lemmyverse and the built in search on shitjustworks to try and find communities that were active. I was surprised to see some communities with a couple thousand members but very little activity.

Third the ability for different federations to communicate with each other has not improved much. There is still a lot of difficulty and confusion there. I found a good summary of the experience at: https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-4-lemmy-piefed-mbin/

Then I decided to give Piefed a try and I like it. I like that it has topics which are similar to multireddits. This subscribes me to enough communities that the content on the front page changed from last night to this morning where on sh.itjust.works it was pretty much the same stuff. Its confusing when I subscribe to a community that isn’t part of a topic though. Sometimes I subscribe and see it was already part of a subtopic but I just wasn’t subscribed to it? Like what determines which communities appear in a topic or not? I still haven’t figured that out. It’d be nice if it provided formatting tools when replying to comments. Like I didn’t want to paste the URL to that blog above but use text you hover over and can click. I also wish the front page of Piefed was more like old reddit. Its a bit disjointed between image posts and texts posts at the moment. Just give me thumbnails and expandos for everything.

The biggest thing I’m seeing though is people just need to start contributing. Feel free to steal from reddit posts, go out and start reading a gaming news site or a regular news sites or whatever. See something you like? Post it up in a community here. Who cares if the community hasn’t had a post in 30 days.

It’s not too bad, but I’m wondering if the is a community like !communitypromo@lemmy.ca but for asking if communities exist.

My two main subs on Reddit are pretty small, so I’m not sure they’ll ever develop here. One maybe has more tech savvy people, the others folks don’t really have extra time to explore new social media.