No Stupid Questions

Don't. Tell him to browse /all and block the ones he doesn't like. And sub to the ones he likes.

I also came from Reddit, and I tried to use a community migration tool. Like for example, I like Animal Crossing (the Nintendo game), and there are 3-4 Animal Crossing communities, but none are active. One is posted to by a bot. There is basically no Animal Crossing community on Lemmy, even though spaces exist. Same for my favourite band, favourite singer, favourite film — all of which had active communities on Reddit.

So the point is to discover them.

That said, I'm a fan of Casual Conversation, Ask Lemmy, and this one — the ones that get people talking.

Also, tell him to ignore content mills — accounts (not sure if bot or person) that just post stuff but don't discuss anything. A dead giveaway is when they post something that is freely available but they post blog spam. Like it would have cost you nothing to just link to the content, but you're hiding it behind ads. So either it's your business or you're the tool of whomever's business it is. And that's not really a user you want to follow. Block a few of those and you'll see more of the "real" Lemmy. (Also, become part of the "real" Lemmy by engaging others in discussion. Not everyone, and definitely don't entertain rude people or people who are trying to herd you into an answer so they can gainsay you — karma isn't a thing on Lemmy, and people who act like it is are, at best, a waste of time, and safely ignored.)

I've found this a good tool for searching communities: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Rather than try out other people's preferences, browse all / new, invest a little time learning how to block instances, communities and users and in no time you'll be browsing content you want to see. Not what any of us want you to see.

What I did was search for similar communities/subreddits I followed on Reddit. After that, went through "communities" and subbed to any that looked interesting.

We need people to take the best/smart stuff from reddit and discuss it here with sources that aren't enshitified.

Once people see the same or better content here, you've planted them here.

This site is like reddit 1.0 when the front-page had BSD/Linux discussions. Hopefully the enshitification of social media continues.

It took Digg slipping once to enrich reddit.

i like to browse "all", i just ignore any communities i dont care about so they dont clog it. Ignoring stuff you dont like is also quite crucial, since YOU are the algorithm here.

Sort by new occasionally, that way you might come by interesting little communities that would get buried otherwise. I also just subscribed to bunch of communities from communities tab, just based on the name.

I guess it depends on their interests.

Still figuring this out , but don't hype it cause there's less activity. To me it's mostly comment quality here

What are his interests? I can make a few suggestions based on them. There is a search bar where he can filter for communities containing keywords he looks for. I also suggest browsing by All, subscribing to communities that interest him, and blocking the communities and users (sometimes it’s a handful of users sharing unwanted content around multiple communities) he doesn’t want to see.

This place doesn't work like reddit. I mean, it's supposed to, but the communities are too small. Everyone basically reads the "All" feed and uses the communities as hashtags essentially.

There are some larger communities, but this place kind of sucks