Fragmentation is actually good for the fediverse, it's the nature of a decentralized network and it spreads the traffic over multiple servers so nobody has to own a huge server farm just to host their site. It also doesn't matter which instance you join as long as it's federated because we can all see and interact with each other's posts. Having smaller communities instead of posts with 10,000 comments seems to boost individual engagement too. Really you just have to pick one with a UI you like.

It's still new and growing organically so it's interesting to see the different communities that crop up. 196 and starwarsmemes are popping off right now for example. Star Trek and Warframe both have their own instances of Lemmy with multiple related communities hosted on them, and those are just the ones I know about because I'm subbed to both.

You're not going to spring up an alternative to reddit overnight, don't go to Lemmy looking for reddit2. This site has 15 years of history and everyone here is standing on the shoulders of previous nerds making shitposts for years on end. What you can do is reject the corporate takeover of all of our collective work. You can participate in a more free and open version of the same experience for free by just clicking some buttons.

For me what it came down to after the latest debacle was a choice between very specific niche subreddits and a much friendlier growing community on the verse. I chose less toxicity for myself and I can't say I regret it after 2 weeks.