I can’t make a comparison unfortunately as I haven’t joined lemmy.zip, but it seems like a good instance to me!

This was my exact trajectory and reasoning, but I ended up adding lemmings.world after that. 😅

I have joined several instances and all have their pros and cons, but I’ll plug the most recent one (lemmings.world) because it checked all of these boxes for me:

• Federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org
• Not federated with certain more problematic instances
• Stable/good uptime record
• Upvotes/downvotes, community creation and image uploads enabled
• I liked the name

Yes, I’d love an audiobooks community! I’d also like audiobook and ebook deals communities.

A headphones community exists! [email protected]

Beauty communities seem conspicuously absent for topics that have a large internet presence elsewhere. Makeup, skincare, hair, nail art, etc. I specifically miss the asian beauty sub.

We have a few general cooking/food communities that are nice and active, but I miss more specific things like ask culinary, chef knives, and communities geared toward dietary restrictions.

City and region-specific forums.

I highly recommend subscribing to a meal delivery kit for a few weeks, I think they’re fantastic for beginners. Reasons:

• Grocery shopping and ingredient portioning is already done for you, allowing you to focus on the cooking
• Ability to try new ingredients without committing to buying a full quantity of the ingredient. It sucks when you buy a specific sauce for a new recipe you want to try, only to realize you’re never going to want to use it again.
• Enough choices in recipes but not an overwhelming amount; there are so many recipes and resources online that that’s all you need to learn, but it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start
• Recipes are generally standardized, well-tested, and don’t require special equipment or advanced techniques

I definitely don’t recommend doing this long term because it starts to get repetitive and is ultimately more expensive than doing your own shopping and planning, but it removes quite a few barriers to entry. Home Chef was the one I enjoyed the most personally but Blue Apron is also reliable and liked by many. Once you are comfortable with the basics you can really just search any recipe you’re interested in and just go for it; follow your interests and the skills will come with experience.

True, I think the “lemmy is so confusing to join” concerns are overblown (just make an account?), but admittedly the community finding part is… not intuitive. People really aren’t seeing everything that’s out there through the standard search if their instance isn’t federated with the instance where the target community is hosted, or no one on their instance has searched for that community before. Having to go offsite for tools to find communities is a poor experience.