Just a thought: But I was reading this thread, and although I had thought of it before - it came back to me again. Seems to me that Lemmy, even a particular instance, could work on a sort of “Categorisation System” function whereby communities would be categorised under certain tags so new users (and anyone really) could filter for communities they have interest in. So you would filter by, for instance: Conversational, Memes, News, Politics, Movies, Gaming, Technology etc. Some communities could have multiple tags. It would even be cool if you could exclude certain tags too. So someone might want to see “News” but not “Politics” and filter for communities focused on news, but without any political focus. There could even be subcategories too, so: “Conservational” would have specific types of discussion underneath it: “Debate”, “Casual” etc.

You could then order by activity, subscribers, creation date - much like you can now on here.

I realise there have been some attempts at this, like: !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but it seems abandoned (and incomplete) and too much work and too awkward to somehow represent in a particular community.

I also think that if such a system was to exist, it would have to somehow be moderated by others as any community mod could poorly or deliberately categorise their community badly. Something on a larger scale to Piefeds system.