Exactly! I’d be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users “Why does nobody use Mastodon?” (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)
I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.
I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don’t think the problem is the naming.
For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you’d look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a “default sub”, it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True<topic> was a common way to find the better community.
Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I’m a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I’m looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that’s /r/freefolk.
And that’s true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that’s !tenforward@lemmy.world
I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn’t really much of a problem. You can usually find what you’re looking for.