@_elena I whole heartily agree. And I’m an Old here. I originally joined the Fediverse in 2917 on an Instance that wasn’t very active so I rarely interacted and posted.

But just prior to the first wave of massive Twitter migration I checked back in to find out I had 24 hours left to move to a new instance. Boy oh boy, my new home was actually not a place I wanted to hang out locally. So I quickly learned to build my Home stream by following interesting people and interacting with them by comments, shares (boosts) and then I saw interesting people there who also,like me, had commented. My Home stream became my first read of the day when I checked in.

Now, where did I find those people? Why that would be the open source Wild West of the Fediverse. The numbers of people posting made a fast moving stream and I could pop over to any interesting post and there were my People! My Tribe is on open source social media and I found them! What a joy.

After a few months I refined my streams to appear in column view, 3 columns across: Home, Local, Fediverse. After a year I found out about Lists and by golly, I could put a List as another stream in a column! My “rock people” are in one, my personal friends in another, my “news people” another. Wowie, I’m making my own algorithm for me, me alone, and it works well. I no longer miss current posts from people I care most about. Yes Antifa Lisa, I’m here for the #Anarchy and #PunkAsFunk. Go Fediverse! Go Mastodon! Go beige.party which is my Instance and #NotACult

As a 30 y.o. Brazilian, I'd add that there's breadth of nationalities as well, even though most Fediverse instances are often biased to a defaultist, US-centric worldview.

And such an existence of biases leads me to a point of your post:

people finding their communities

Which, unfortunately, haven't been my case. Even when it comes to the aspect that has been the most important of my existence in the recent years, spirituality, those who could share a similar (syncretic) belief seem to be mostly at Facebook, TikTok and Telegram, platforms I permanently left a long time ago.

It seems to me, at least this is my sensation when I browse Lemmy and Mastodon, that the Fediverse userbase mostly leans towards either atheism or mainstream beliefs.

Add the inherent discrete nature of occultism and finding Gnostic/Lilithian/Thelemite/Luciferian/Goetian/etc kinship is like trying to find a "Dark Forest" (a nod to the "Dark Forest Hypothesis") within a light-millennia worth of cosmic void, a forest in a planet where the atmosphere may not even allow the kind of spaceship I'm aboard (a Lucifer-centered circle I used to participate, for example, didn't accept my transition to a more syncretic, Lilith-centered belief).

Also add the fact that I do not fully belong to any specific label (notice how I listed several belief systems in my previous paragraph, followed by the "etc"; that's because my belief borrows from each of those systems, plus other belief systems and pantheons I didn't extensively mention, some are said to be "dead religions" and/or "mythologies" nowadays, such as Sumerian where Ereshkigal is described), that I don't fully take an entire "worldview pack", instead borrowing from several "worldview packs" to build my own idiosyncratic worldview, and I'm kind of fated to belong nowhere at all.

Sometimes I become too frustrated with how my content in the Fediverse is mostly met with silence or hollow/numeric reactions, but then I remember it's not exactly the Fediverse to blame, it's simply because I've been in the wrong places. But then the "correct places" don't even seem to exist, at least when it comes to the entirety of my worldviews in all of their depth and breadth.

I mean, I know a few Sumerian cuneiforms and words (from dingir/digir "a divine name" to uš "death" and mušen "bird"), it doesn't mean I'd be able to fully live in Akkadia if the city still existed today. Similarly, I've been studying owl-centered ornithology a lot lately, it doesn't mean I fit Lemmy's superbowl community whose focus is mainly scientific (while mine is esoteric, with strigiformes, as I believe, being one of the zoomorphic manifestations from Stolas (a teacherly prince, knOWLedgeable of astronomy) and, most importantly, Mother Queen Lilith).

So, I'd say people finding their communities is not a certain aspect of the Fediverse, even the current Web as a whole, a digital mirror of a world where things have been so polarized...