But how do you reliably find large active communities? I’m still new around here! Like if I’m into movie discussions, how do I know if I picked one that has like 5 subs on some obscure small instance vs one with a big subscriber base.

TeaHands

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Check out lemmyverse.net/communities, it'll let you search (almost) everything without being limited by your instance, and you can sort by whatever criteria you want.

Schlomocucumber

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As someone new to all this, thank you so much!!

TeaHands

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No worries! Feel free to ask if there's anything else you're still hung up on.

ShinetheMoment

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Thank you!

JohnDClay

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My favorite way is browsing all (that includes all that are federated with the instance) and subing to communities I like

Mongostein

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Subscribe to both with the understanding that the communities are still much smaller than on Reddit.

ramplay

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Look for them! The instance you're on has minimal limitations to where you can interact (barring defederation)

Poob

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Here is a site with information about Lemmy, https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Here's a site that gives details on instance populations, general rules, functionality, and reliability. https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. This site is a couple weeks out of date, but gives a good look into what each instance allows.