Yeah, as an answer to the specific question at hand Lemmy.ml is where she should make an account. That was my first instinct. Who can say when sign ups will be open again. Probably when 0.18.1 is out and there is a new captcha option available.

I didn’t think the parallel communities issues was a true issue until I was looking around yesterday however. All is where the discovery happens, but, if like 30% of the hot posts are from memes@inst1.com, memes@inst2.net, memes@inst3.ml, memes@inst4.org, memes@inst5.co.uk it becomes less useful.

Each hot post in those communities is independently ranked against each other then added to the feed.

I know there isn’t a simple answer and that reddit potentially had the same problem. However reddit would eventually have a winner in the memes arm race and the rest would wither in popularity. But on Lemmy there less likely to happen because of how local vs subscription vs all work.

I’m going to browse local, because at least here the culture is very different so it’s worth it. But in the sea of general instances trying to be “Reddit” you just end up with dozens of individual communities on a topic that all have the same homogeneous point of view.

I think overtime one generalist instance will rise above the rest, but in the meantime it’s just weird enough that I think you’ll lose some people back to reddit.

I feel like Lemmy is a lot closer to a functional replacement for reddit then mastodon is for Twitter. But it’s still weird enough to be hard to recommend.