Yes, seeing other instances communities from your own instance can be painful, and this is (as far as I understand) something the devs are working on. The way I do this is by simply setting the feed to all, so that you can see communities from all instances. If you need to look for a specific community from another instance see here.

I totally see your point here (and @unsunny@beehaw.org’s). Yet, I still believe this is one of the most puzzling things for new people. People are just used to sign up and go, the fact they have to choose where can be pretty baffling imo, and maybe push them to desist.

This is just my opinion, but I think we should think about making the transition as smooth as possible (little by little, people will understand how this works and get used to it). Talking about my personal experience, I signed up on feddit.it, but I always look at the all feed (so I’m actually mostly hanging in beehaw or lemmy.ml communities). Again, I totally get your point of view here, and you’re totally correct. I’m just saying that my impression is people are super puzzled by the sign-up mechanism, which can be a pretty huge barrier preventing people from actually joining lemmy.

As others have said, I would not talk about de-federation, and try to keep text as concise as possible. I believe we need a super easy, short and visual guide (this one is definitely on the right track).

I think the core concepts that should be illustrated are:

• fediverse nature (as you did);
• it doesn’t matter where (on which instance) you sign up, you can still access and interact with all content of any other instance. Could be seen like having multiple doors (or streets) to access the same room (or town square).

I believe these two are the most important bits of information (and what puzzles people the most)