You don’t have to find an instance for X, just a community. Go to the communities tab and search for ‘plants’ and see what comes uob. It’ll show the communities in your instance and then in other instances. Click onntnem subscribe its all connected.

Then on your Frontpage there is a tab on top between Subscribed, Local, All.

Subscribed shows posts from everything you subscribed only. Local is posts from your instance only All is posts from all instances federated.

Yeah it’s there “This house is full, please go to another one…” but unless you know what’s up. That could be a huge deterrent to new users which I don’t think it’s the goal. I now know how this fediverse thing works and that it doesn’t really matter which instance I’m using. But for a lot of new users that concept doesn’t even register. So it needs to be more transparent from a UX perspective. Sure we could leave it as a sort of “gatekeep” and from a certain point of view it makes sense. It all depends on what the lemmy devs what to achieve.

I would go one step further that the instance thing should be transparent. Like when you sign up, some process could determine from a “neutral instances pool” which is the one you should join, then when you log in you’re in that instance but you don’t really know where you are. It just “works”. That probably requires a lot of rework and sharing login infomration between instances. But as a more “aspirational thing”

This is something that lemmy devs need to better address. This is an “Eternal September” kind of situation. People (me included) are not used to the fediverse. They think you can participate only if you’re in that instance. And people want content, so they think "why’s the instance with most people? Ahh lemmy.ml? Cool, let’s join.