I joined lemmy.one because it presents itself as friendly to beginners/Reddit refugees. On the plus side, it’s worked very consistently and fast. They’re also federated with pretty much everything, so there’s plenty of content to choose from and narrow by subscribing and blocking.

On the minus side, you can’t create communities there and the only communities that exist are chat, meta, and some security and privacy focused communities. So you’ll have to get most of your content from across the ‘verce. (Which it part of the part of the point Lemmy anyway.) Also, as a beginner-friendly instance, there’s some tutorial-ish stickied messages depending on how I set my view settings.

The only significant disadvantage is if I ever want to create my own community, I need another account elsewhere. Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with my choice.

You might be able to make a [Meta] post in said community and ask for the sidebar to be expanded. Who knows, maybe it’ll work.

Sometimes, but mostly I use tap to type. Usually swipe is accurate, but I don’t always want the risk that it’ll get something wrong and it’ll take longer to fix it than if I’d just typed it straight away.