I can’t make a comparison unfortunately as I haven’t joined lemmy.zip, but it seems like a good instance to me!

This was my exact trajectory and reasoning, but I ended up adding lemmings.world after that. 😅

I have joined several instances and all have their pros and cons, but I’ll plug the most recent one (lemmings.world) because it checked all of these boxes for me:

• Federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org
• Not federated with certain more problematic instances
• Stable/good uptime record
• Upvotes/downvotes, community creation and image uploads enabled
• I liked the name

Yes, I’d love an audiobooks community! I’d also like audiobook and ebook deals communities.

A headphones community exists! !headphones@lemmy.film

Beauty communities seem conspicuously absent for topics that have a large internet presence elsewhere. Makeup, skincare, hair, nail art, etc. I specifically miss the asian beauty sub.

We have a few general cooking/food communities that are nice and active, but I miss more specific things like ask culinary, chef knives, and communities geared toward dietary restrictions.

City and region-specific forums.

True, I think the “lemmy is so confusing to join” concerns are overblown (just make an account?), but admittedly the community finding part is… not intuitive. People really aren’t seeing everything that’s out there through the standard search if their instance isn’t federated with the instance where the target community is hosted, or no one on their instance has searched for that community before. Having to go offsite for tools to find communities is a poor experience.