Doom scrolling on TVTropes is much more entertaining.

Wait maybe that’s not the best idea if one wants to be lulled to sleep.

Have you considered reading random research papers off PubMed?

Yep.

So I have one primary account on Lemmy.world and then have additional accounts localized to those instances.

For the time being things are a bit of a hassle because there’s no good way to migrate from one instance to another and bring your data with you, and the underlying lemmy software is still in development.

Effectively we’re doing this in production!

Yea unfortunately the nature of Federation means that instances (servers) are dissociated from each other but nonetheless communicate with each other via a standardized protocol. Consequently, there is nothing stopping one instance from saying they want to stop communicating with another instance

In some situations that makes sense. For example, if you are running an instance and don’t want to get people/content from another instance that posts incredibly hateful messages, you can choose to defederate from that instance.

In other situations it creates complications. For example, if you are on a somewhat popular instance (like Lemmy.world) but then get defederated from an instance you want to participate in (like Beehaw.org), even if the defederation came from justifiable reasons, you will need a Beehaw account in order to view that content as you won’t be able to access new content from Beehaw.org using your Lemmy.world account.

For the most part, in pragmatic terms what this really means is if one wants to participate in the most active instances, they’ll probably want an account on an instance that federates with the biggest instances.

Due to the nature of Federation, don’t hesitate to make accounts on different instances as needed to access that instance’s content. I reckon a number of people have accounts on Beehaw and accounts elsewhere.

I’ve functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.

The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.

A “multireddit” at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the “subscribed” feed).