My only feedback is that I don’t think they need to be categorised as “for Americans” and “for Europeans”

On top of the latency issues, privacy laws and regulations are different between the US and Europe. Also, a lot of LW users were surprised to learn than LW is European managed and hosted during the whole jury nullification LW ToS discussion, so I prefer to make it a clear statement from the start.

It’s not just Americans vs. Europeans in general. Aussie.zone says “Lemmy for Australians and those that love Australia”, and lemmy.ca says “A canadian-run community, geared towards canadians” Feddit.org says “Wir sind eine deutsch- und englischsprachige Lemmy Community und entwickelten uns aus feddit.de heraus.”, which if you scroll down far enough is also translated as “We are a German and English-speaking Lemmy community that evolved from feddit.de.”

All of these will welcome people from outside of their space, but then definitely have obvious themes going on relating to their nationality, which may cause some people to feel like they don’t belong. Similarly, Lemmy.zip says “A Lemmy community for everyone, with a focus towards tech, PCs, and gaming.” There are so many others for LGBTQIA+, climate change, NSFW, anime, specific show series like Star Trek, etc. And Midwest.social combines both a location and non-location based theme with “A lemmy server for, but not limited to, leftists in the Midwest USA.” So leftists in another country or even region, or centrist libs, will feel excluded.

That’s one reason why discuss.online is so great, “A general purpose Lemmy instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It’s a Lemmy place for all.” And it has superb uptime, prompting me to move there when my previous instance startrek.website kept having so many connection issues. Though latency halfway around the world might be an issue? (I would not know, I haven’t tested, and it legit might not be?) And as Blaze mentioned, different laws e.g. Donald Trump could demand that all negative mentions of his name be scrubbed, at which point any USA-based instance is going to have to comply or else face his (hand-picked) Supreme Court-backed wrath.

And then there’s issues that would never be written down, or change too often even if they were, to be kept updated. e.g. all the database corruption issues that have been going on for months at programming.dev, see [email protected] for details.

One resource that helps me look at things is https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list. However, there is no way to share a URL that sorts that list by Monthly Active Users - so when you click that link, you won’t recognize a single name there, and will have to onboard yourself with how to make use of that tool before you can begin to use it to see the top 20 or so instances.

And after all that effort, it still won’t tell you some CRUCIAL details like whether an instance is only run by a single admin or not. I used to tell people about quokk.au as one of the only 3 instances across the entire Fediverse that had defederated from the big 3 tankie instances, but someone said that they had requested an account and after several days it was not accepted (a week? sorry I don’t recall now how long they waited but the comment is here, https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/11386011, although the time resolution info is now gone I believe, or at least I don’t know how to get higher precision using the web UI).

And then ofc there’s the situation of prickly admins, most notably lemmy.ml that routinely bans people for opaque rules never written down anywhere, plus you can be banned from communities that you’ve never even heard of much less visited or interacted with in any way - it’s just how they like to do things over there.

We who are here are okay with such complexities, in an ever-shifting landscape (can you post from Lemmy to Mastodon? okay, how about now? is Lemmy the only way to access the Threadiverse? I’m typing this from PieFed btw so definitely not anymore:-). But the mainstream person is not, and talking with Blaze to see all of these complexities I am convinced that they are too numerous for a simple explanation to suffice. Unless that is, someone is willing to do that kind of effort to understand and then make the post and then keep making new ones as time passes and things change - e.g. when Sublinks is released, Lemmy.World has strongly hinted at wanting to switch to it and thereby leave Lemmy software behind, bc of the association with it being tankies and dependent upon lemmy.ml for the listing of communities.

Given such complexities, the simple list here of just two alternatives for links to click on and check out even without needing an account signup to look and see what we are about, seems ideal.

But you are correct: the next layer down is still very much lacking. And then it all continues further with community discovery, after picking ah instance. For myself, I’m pinning my hopes on PieFed rather than Lemmy, for so many reasons but to name just two: Categories of Communities helping onboard new people without having to choose between simply All or Local, and it being written in Python rather than Rust. It has a long way to go yet to even catch up with some Lemmy features like searching for posts, yet in some ways it’s already ahead of it so…