carnha

At the bottom right of every page, you can click on the “Instances” button (or just go to https://lemmy.zip/instances) to see what instances your site is federated with/is defederated from. lemmy.ml is under linked, so lemmy.zip is federating with them.

What you may be running into is that on this smaller instance, you may need to discover the communities:

These previous ways [searching for instances] will only show communities that are already known to the instance. Especially if you joined a small or inactive Lemmy instance, there will be few communities to discover. You can find more communities by browsing different Lemmy instances, or using the Lemmy Community Browser. When you found a community that you want to follow, enter its URL (e.g. https://feddit.de/c/main) or the identifier (e.g. !main@feddit.de) into the search field of your own Lemmy instance. Lemmy will then fetch the community from its original instance, and allow you to interact with it. The same method also works to fetch users, posts or comments from other instances.

(from the join-lemmy docs)

Agree - I jumped from a OnePlus 5T to a Pixel 5a 2 years ago and have no regrets. It really depends on what you’re modding for, but I found that on Pixel not having (as much) bloatware, getting the latest Android updates, having real Google Camera support instead of chasing the best mod, and using Wavelet instead of Viper4Android took care of most of my rooting needs. Instead, with the unlockable bootloader I’ve been able to explore custom OSes like GrapheneOS which has been really great!