"federated next to useless?" nah it's my favorite. best way to find new people to follow
transscribe7891
unfortunately in my experience reddit still has more niche communities than can be found on lemmy, probably bc they have more users. they have more subreddits for specific games, cities/states, mental illnesses, spiritualities/world mythologies, art, music, and book genres... the number of times I've searched for a community on lemmy only for it to not exist makes me hesitant to accept this video's claim. reddit still has more niches than us. we just don't have the numbers or activity.
I wouldn't say MSN isn't a source but I see what you mean about the author info at the bottom. Looks like I also missed the part at the top of the MSN link that said it was originally posted at TheDesk, so I guess it is legit. I'd only searched up other sources just to cross-check the original to see if more than one outlet was talking about it and check its validity, so either way yeah it checks out.
I'm on like 3 different ones, mainly defcon.social. All of them are under 5k users. I use a desktop app called Sengi to show feeds from all my accounts at once and group the federated feeds together, so yeah I can watch lots of posts fly by or scroll through at my leisure.
And yeah I pretty much just watch until I see a post I wanna favorite or boost. That's why I say it's the best way to find new accounts you wouldn't otherwise have thought to check out.
Generally my local and home feeds are much slower. So on mobile, when I'm done catching up on those I keep refreshing the federated. I would be so bored without the federated.