I can appreciate that. I would suggest do both - go back to the niche reddits while they work for you, and hopefully things don't get even worse to affect that. Meanwhile, check back to these newer alternatives often to see what's going on. Perhaps at some point you can either have both worlds or even finally transition away. You have to do what works for you in the end.

My first reply here, and that's why I've gone ahead and branched out into different directions before things go dark. I missed out on Digg, but at the time I had gone from Usenet to various boards, and when some of them began to get quieter or stale looked around and found Reddit, soon after the Digg migration. I don't know if it's Lemmy or some other that will/can take up the need for a collective aggregate service, but this has potential and I like the distributed idea. With improved UI for the novice it could turn into the next Reddit without some of the baggage (and probably its own issues).

Redditors made such memes a thing, we're taking them with us where we go.

You're probably more active now because it's a major event and things are changing. Would it be any different if it was some breaking tech news happening that was interesting and Reddit was like before? Maybe you find Lemmy more involving because the content is different than Reddit had been providing.

Good to know. I've been trying to figure out how to get either of them to work, but if they aren't as great as advertised, then I'll stick with plain. I'm here for content anyway.

I had to use "All" to find some of mine even knowing their exact location. Maybe the default should change from Communities if it needs some adjusting before it works.

Correct. A connection with just one isn't going to dump everything from that server to yours, only the content you picked.

Yes, plus the tools to find information and discuss will improve as demand increases. The biggest challenge right now is stability, but once that gets nailed down we should see some interesting branching of things.

Would it resort it into the original posted area if it later grabs the metadata, or is the push a one time thing?

In retrospect that makes sense, the last thing we want is a recursive effort to try and update things all the time.

Default search is for Communities but I found I could only find some I looked for if I changed it to "All" when searching. It would say nothing found otherwise. They were an existing (but new) community on another Lemmy instance.

That entry says that a recent update should have fixed it, yet it's obviously still happening.