Yes, some of the bigger communities there are !pcgaming@lemmy.ca, !til@lemmy.ca, !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca, !lemmyconnect@lemmy.ca, !bicycles@lemmy.ca, !trippinthroughtime@lemmy.ca, !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@lemmy.ca, !plex@lemmy.ca and !shittyfoodporn@lemmy.ca. And none of these are Canada-specific. I guess I have to follow !fediverselore@lemmy.ca now 😀

Canadians are Americans too.

No … my alts always have different names. But they are for things I don’t want others to know.

Doesn’t blahaj.zone itself throw errors all the time?

I subscribed 10 on lemmy.ml and 8 on lemmy.world.

lemmy.world is definitely the biggest instance with it’s 126k users, but lemmy.ml with 46k, lemmynsfw with 35k, hexbear with 24k and sh.itjust.works with 22k aren’t small either

Yes, lemmy.world is the biggest, but the next four biggest instances combined have just as many users.

I didn’t mean communities with the same name on different instances, but active communities with related topics.

A bit of a stretch would be music genres linking to each other, open source games linking each other etc.

But more specifically closely related communities !ich_iel@feddit.de and !hessisch_iel@feddit.de (dialect variation of the former) or !me_irl@lemmy.ml, !ich_iel@feddit.de, !ik_ihe@feddit.nl, !eu_nvr@lemmy.eco.br and other translations linking each other. Or !minetest@lemmy.ml and !mineclone2@lemmy.world (game/mod of the former) linking each other.

Example screenshot with sidebar of r/meirl, which isn’t r/me_irl:

Yep, such links like between fuck cars and yimby are what I meant.

Though a link with Bang-Syntax might be easier, otherwise that results in a bit of instance hopping and switching to browser in some mobile apps.

People will, very quickly, want to be able to subscribe to channels.

Mastodon can do that. On mastodon channels are groups that boost posts, which means they can be followed. Mastodon handles lemmy similarly.

Even then, I can’t just watch the video and write a comment at the same time, in any sane way.

Yes, but that’s even hard on youtube, because you have to scroll down. It’s easy to do though, despite quite hidden. If you aren’t logged in and press comment or subscribe peertube asks you for you fediverse handle and redirects you to your fediverse instance (on mastodon: corresponding post for comment; follow popup with the group/user for subscribe). In that regard it works a lot better than lemmy.

In fact, if I happen to click a link to watch a video, there’s nowhere to go to in order to watch the video from my non-PeerTube account.

Which gets us back to this, because mastodon embeds the video into the post (the webinterface at least). Clicking on comment does exactly this, but it’s definitely not intuitive and it’s still the player from that peertube instance. I don’t know if it works with anything other than mastodon. It certainly doesn’t work with lemmy right now.

Here a screenshot of it, because I can’t give a link. Mastodon will immediately redirect you to peertube if you aren’t logged in.

It seems it has a similar struggle mastodon has. The best way to find interesting posts there are boost from your bubble and hashtags. Peertube has tags too, but it doesn’t seem it can follow/subscribe to them like mastodon can.