Another traveler of the wireways.
I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.
Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.
You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:
Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).
Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.
It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.
I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.
Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.
Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.
Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.
In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.
Yes. Alongside what others have mentioned, I think a couple factors are context oversight (in part from context collapse at times) and subsequent fumbling of code switching.
Many primarily comment in news or politics threads (see front pages with sort set to Active) or otherwise more serious communities, so I think it carries through in their other interactions elsewhere. It’s something of a bummer because generally neither party to fumbled interactions feels good about it.
Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I’ve gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it’s Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.
It’s unfortunate as those aren’t the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It’s part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they’re much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.
Keep an eye on [email protected], search via Marginalia Search, and check out the ooh directory among other things.
Also look out for webrings (or similar) on some of the sites you may find, as they can help you find other likeminded net people.
Some people are trying to bring back some of the old navigation methods, but with some improvements, to keep the open net around.