Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
If your instance doesn’t know about a community yet, you need to try loading it twice. First time it’ll give an error, second time will work.
How do I search a community that my instance doesn’t know about to try and find it in the first place, I must apologize for my ignorance, but I’ve never found a good explainer on the finer details of federation.
Personally, I use Lemmyverse explorer and check @tcbot_uam@feddit.uk’s trending communities.