I never was a big social media guy. Never had a Facebook or anything, except what google forced on me like Google+ and on reddit, I just used it for very specific tasks, when I couldn't find answers anywhere else.
With the current shitstorm on reddit I decided that enough is enough and wanted to give this Fediverse I keep hearing about a try. With a little bit of searching around, I made an account, got the mobile app and things seemed settled. Until I tried finding stuff more targeted than a wall of posts on jerbil.
Granted, I haven't read, let alone tried everything yet, but it seems limited, or most likely, I have no idea what I'm doing. Take for example emulation. One of the subreddits I was in, was about emulation since that's a topic I'm passionate about. Good, went to the link provided to search for communities and got 11 results. As expected for the most part.
What was not expected was most of them being in the double digits of users with the biggest ones showing 3 posts and like..6 comments total.
I know that while the fediverse is not new by any means, there's a large growth now with the shit happening over at reddit and is in by no means as populated or interacted with as the latter. But those numbers seem so small to me that I'm sure I'm doing something wrong.
Please help out an illiterate idiot?
PS. Emulation was just an example I was interested with. It's not the point of my post.
I'm facing similar problems. What helped me settle here, though, were the right tools. The most helpful being:
The Lemmy Explorer, which helps you find forums across all Lemmy instances: https://lemmyverse.net/
Lemmy Link, which make it easier to show forums on the lemmy instance you are using: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-link/
And, as a bit of a wild card, I made an RSS feed. If you don't know what it is, it basically let's you subscribe to websites so that any articles or threads show up in one big personal newspaper. That way, I can get both the few Lemmy topics that are here and supplant the rest with "loose" websites like blogs or news sites.
Lemmy is fully compatible with RSS as are many other sites. If a site isn't, it's fairly easy to make it compatible with a generator. After that, it's just a matter of gathering the links you want.
I'd recommend checking out Feedly and just tinkering to see if it's something you'd enjoy. It's not a full replacement, but it does allow you to make things more personal.