Something like this needs to be incorporated by devs at the UX onboarding level if you want success.

During mass migration times, you need to really hold new users hands to curate a path towards community ideals. Needs to be as easy as clicking boxes to attempt to create accounts on multiple instances and then app defaults to the local option to start, or something similar.

You'll only get a few crumbs here and there from dedicated people if it's that manual of a process.

Wouldn't this put me at risk of that smaller instance defederizing and removing everything I contribute while logged in to that instance?

I tried to migrate to another instance by rejoining the same communities as this account. However I can't seem to find some of the communities anymore through the other instance's search page. There's no indication that there's any defederation going on.

I still have no idea what a proper community joining process is. I just go to the search page, type it in and scroll through the random comments until I find a link to a community.

If only I could just copy the community link, right now it'll just open up with lemmy.world again, so I have to go through the other instance's search page. Please let me know if there's a guide of any kind.

Edit: Ok you need to manually type the URLs. E.g. if you wanted to open this community on lemmy.ml, type "lemmy.ml/c/fediverse@lemmy.world"

That's a kinda clunky experience ngl. How is the average normie going to feel about appending URLs in the address bar tho.

I think the concerns about smaller instances are valid (as I post from lemmus.org). Some additional data points to consider when evaluating an instance would be whether they're running a recent version and the uptime of the instance.

It'd probably be a good idea to have a page that promotes these smaller instances that 'score' well to help distribute some of the load.

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.

I joined https://lemmy.myserv.one but I have to resubscribe to all my communities? How can you avoid this and have it automatic?

So can I just start running my only instance on my home server and just let only a few friends use it, then federate with the rest?

An export/import for "subscribed" communities would encourage a lot of people to do this.