jlai.lu (hides it really well on a link to an external website which only links to dead browse.feddit.de link)

What do you mean? This is the guide linked in the sidebar: https://jlai.lu/post/623268

Where did you see any mention to browse.feddit.de?

Pretty dead community though.

To be fair, it’s acting more as a collection of useful posts than anything else. It makes sense that it’s not that active

I find this really disappointing. How the hell are people on these instances, especially small ones even find niche communities on other instances? It’s not like lemmyverse gets discussed much anymore.

• Use the search and select “federated” “Communities” filter
• Know about the Lemmyverse because it’s in their guides

Thank you so much for doing all of this work, to help advance the Fediverse! You not only are being helpful to point out the problem, but even provided viable solutions too!:-) (and additional considerations as to why they should be applied, beyond the obvious “it doesn’t work”)

I also see that most guide-type things across the Fediverse date back to roughly one year ago, during/after the Rexodus… and as you say, have not been updated since. Even the “updated” Lemmy Explorer link that you provided as a solution seems to be aware only that Kbin magazines exist, but I could not find a way to list Mbin ones. (also, “magazines” iirc was the equivalent of a “community”, not an “instance”… but it’s been a minute and I could be wrong there - still it’s something to be checked; Edit: oh, and it appears that they really are magazines, therefore I don’t know how to find a list of mbin instances at all - though I’ve seen it once somewhere, so it’s somehow possible, I’m just not sure how to find it)

You mentioned my instance for example (I am no admin, just a user, but this is what I can find out by reading the various old posts), Discuss.Online in particular might be waiting to spring over to Sublinks - which I am personally quite excited about, yet I see no activity (on the demo version anyway) after 4 months, so presume its development is held up in technical matters (I haven’t checked the github in a long time, but surely that’s true regardless, right?:-P). I presume, or else I hope that we would have heard more about the activity related to its development. Similarly with PieFed and Tesseract etc. (and I don’t want to leave out Mbin, though that has been live for months now rather than something “coming”, and again please ignore how that url calls them “kbin magazines” rather than “mbin instances” - it is what it is edit: oops, I took a deeper look and apparently I misunderstood, they really were magazines, that were somehow related to Kbin, even though located on other instances? whatever, they don’t seem to be Mbin instances in any case).

The version of Lemmy itself is only ~0.19.5, so perhaps we should infer that it is not in fact a beta, but more of an early-release alpha? Or whatever it is called, it has already what the developers cared most about putting into it, and everything else not so much - as would be expected of any open-source project hehe:-). The choice of Rust as a coding language may have something to do with it - it is quite robust, but also quite difficult to learn, from what I hear, thereby limiting contributions of actual code. Also the developers are reputedly difficult to talk to - e.g. you must agree with their particular political stance (which among so many other things, defends Russian aggression against Ukraine, iirc?), or you are banned from their instance without a method to appeal. (Though I am not all that close to this situation, so I could be wrong in some of these details.)

And regarding [email protected], indeed I had never heard of that community myself until Blaze mentioned it to me literally two days ago, though they seem very knowledgeable about every community across the entire Fediverse, so I imagine if there was a more-suitable one to aid new users, that they would have mentioned it instead? There are ofc some other relevant ones, such as this community, Ask Lemmy, [email protected], etc. - but those all seem more for established users, and especially with the higher turn-over of posts, therefore not exactly well-suited to a brand-new user of the Fediverse seeking to find knowledge, even if it is old, about how to best get along here. Though if you - or anyone - is aware of such, then I (and surely Blaze as well) would love to hear about it!? :-P Otherwise, it seems preferable to use it rather than having to create a new one - and more importantly populate it with posts, get the word out, etc. Yes listing this community is an imperfect solution - but it is a viable one!:-D

So it is not merely a link or two that is outdated and flat-out nonfunctionally wrong… there are MAJOR structural issues with the Fediverse, both having occurred in the past and planned for the next several months (I… think? I hope!?) in the future. Though anyway that is no reason not to fix it, so again I wanted to say thank you for showing some love & care for this place that we all seem to enjoy talking to one another on!:-)