Asklemmy

You can visit the actual instance, e.g. lemmy.world and then check out communities at the top. Not sure if there's a better way yet, someone let me know if so!

Edit: I visited beehaw.org, which seems to be a relatively large fediverse site (I'm new, don't judge), and their communities tab lists communities they host locally and others they are federated with. You can subscribe to any one of them through kbin by pasting the full address of the community (which looks like communityname@hosturl, usually listed on the right hand side column in the community) into kbin's search bar.

Also the notifications for comment replies are turned off by default on kbin. Actually, all notifications seem to be off. It detracts from the new user experience as people don't realize their comments have been replied to. Turn on your notifications in your settings!

I'm wondering this too. And if there's a good way to see what instances there are in the first place.

I'm quite sure I understand how the overall "fediverse" system works on a technical level, and I think most people are quite capable of understanding the architecture of the system.

What people are confused about when they ask how this works (and are answered with useless email analogies and metaphors as to how the architecture is set up) is the user experience of finding curated content similar to a way they are used to getting on centralized systems.

I don't think most people are confused about what federation is or how the underlying protocol works, nor do they need the details unless they are interested in creating and hosting their own instances. What people are wondering is how they can recreate a reddit-like (or twitter like, in the case of mastodon) experience, while the decentralized nature of the system seemingly makes it impossible.

lemmy.directory is attempting to show all communities from all instances (federate all instances? I'm not sure of the terms yet). they're doing a decent job so far I think