I highly recommend the Lemmy Universal Link Switcher user script, installed through Violentmonkey. It makes everything so much easier and more enjoyable. It basically rewrites every Lemmy link to a link that’s specific to your home instance. I.e. it allows you to click any Lemmy link, and it will open up on your home instance. This also means that you can just go to some other instance, explore the communities and easily open them on your home instance to subscribe to them. It also works with posts, e.g. if you see a post that you want to comment on, it will redirect you to the same post but on your instance, so you can use your account and interact with it.
Btw lemmyverse.net also has an option to set a home instance, making it easier to subscribe to communities:
It’s not the “AI nightmare”, it’s a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
It’s great. It’s essentially Firefox, but without the unnecessary bullshit like Sponsored sites or Pocket integration, and it has some quite significant privacy and security improvements. Also comes with uBlock Origin pre-installed.