Absolutely, I’d personally never use Discord as I’d use Lemmy, but some people sure are trying even if it is very counter-intuitive.

Its not that strange: people use what they are familiar with. Most people have a Discord account these days and migrating over there is as easy as clicking an invite link. In contrast Lemmy is relatively unknown and untested to the general audience, and is a step higher on the hassle scale, even if it is a similar service to Reddit - not counting the usual fediverse complications.

People are drawn to go as far down the hassle scale as possible, the fewer steps between them and their goal the better.

Not that a lot of communities did successfully migrate over here, partially or not. Lemmy is a lot more active now than when I started looking into it during the initial API struggle in June.

While it has problems of its own, instances could pool and share that knowledge. The first time an instance talks to a different insta ce it could just ask “hey, what other instances are you aware of?”. The main issue there is just instances obsessively sending exponentially growing lists of instances back and forth.

But no, that is the main bane of federated social media, discoverability without a center of truth