ProdigalFrog

There’s some good channels on TILVids and Kolektiva.media, and if you’re looking for something specific, Sepiasearch is able to search across all peertube instances.

Consolidation sometimes happens, but sometimes doesn’t for certain reasons, such as a community being abandoned, or different visions for a similar topic.

Personally I would recommend picking the most popular community or the one that seems to appeal to you the most, and only posting in that one, while staying subscribed to the others (if they are active) to keep abreast of that content and be able to participate in the comments if you desire.

Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.

As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.

But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.

If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.

Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn’t switch.

“Oh, it’s too small, my niche communities aren’t there”

“The UI isn’t as nice”

“The mod tools aren’t as good”

Etc.

Ooh, that’s nice. I could see that effectively replacing disqus comments below articles. Cool beans!