I started moving from Reddit to Lemmy a few days ago, and since then I've been forcing myself to spend time here and getting myself used to it. I quickly checked the list of popular instances and decided to join lemmy.world and not beehaw because I didn't like their decision of defederating other big lemmy instances.
I've been lurking lemmy.world for a bunch of days, and I like it enough not to look back at Reddit anymore, so props to that. It feels a bit chaotic though, with many tiny communities being created all the time with very few post and comments in them.
Today I decided to take a look at beehaw's and in perspective it feels so organized and content rich that I'm quite impressed.
I guess it comes with a big amount of moderation and organized content creation work and I wonder how sustainable is that in the long run, but props to them so far for the project!
Does the username you're trying to register already exist? I heard that the current version of Lemmy doesn't report already existing usernames to the user. Instead the registration just fails silently.