The biggest c/gaming was on beehaw, but that's defederated. Maybe nobody else wanted to do it again and just stuck to smalller communities based on particular systems.
Federation can be a one way street. The problem with that is your comments and votes will only be visible from the instance you did it from. Lemmy.world will show other Lemmy.world users your comment but Beehaw will not ever see it, which means your comment will not proliferate to other instances either.
You can still browse content from an instance that has defederated yours but your actions will only be visible on your own instance.
When I originally decided to join a lemmy community I signed up with beehaw.org and was accepted. During the reddit apocalypse I also registered for lemmy.world
From my understanding, and someone please treat me like I'm a 5 year old, when I view gaming@beehaw.org via my lemmy.world account I only see old beehaw user posts (from before de-federation) and every lemmy.world user post but only lemmy.world users can see my posts? However, if I view from my beehaw account I can see all posts from lemmy.world and beehaw users but only beehaw users can see my posts?
Does this extend to comments? If I comment on a lemmy.world user's post through my beehaw account... that OP just won't ever see it?
Yes. Beehaw blocks lemmy.world (lw), but not vice versa.
Therefore, a lw user can see all new beehaw content, but any interaction - commenting or voting, will not get back to beehaw, and so it can't federate them to other instances either. So anything a lw user does on beehaw is only visible to other lw users.
Beehaw users can only see lw content from before when beehaw defederated from lw, but should be able to interact with it normally, except for other lw users like in the last paragraph.
My understanding is that each instance essentially clones posts and comments of other instances that they are federated with. In the case of Beehaw, you'll see the old versions of posts and comments that were cloned to lemmy.world before Beehaw federated, but nothing since. So the users of each defederated instance will only see the respective version cloned on their instance, but not the new comments or posts that have happened since.
Beehaw had concerns about lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because they had open registrations, rather than requiring an application process like they and some other instances do.
The idea is that users being able to join these instances freely meant they couldn't be properly "vetted" to weed out the trolls/racists/harassers/etc., and they didn't believe they had the infrastructure/moderation capability to properly monitor the scale of this new audience themselves.
Part of me gets it, but in hindsight it does seem like the concerns were a bit overblown (at least compared to actual bad instances like exploding heads) and I'm surprised they haven't refederated by now. Beehaw staying defederated from two other major instances is proof that it actually does matter which Lemmy instance you register for, making it harder for new users to figure out which one they should join.
Not enough people know about that very useful website. Although I think that Lemmy should have this kind of complete search as a native feature without needing to go to a third party website.
Yeah that one is fairly active. The issue with browsing all is the amount of posts that come out of lemmyshitposting and memes that flood the feed.
I can't recommend lemmyverse.net enough to find cool instances and communities. Once you find a community you like on it just copy the URL and paste it into a search from your instance.
I originally wanted to make a gaming focused instance but ended up making an anime one. I think somebody should consider making a gaming focused one. Generally, I think we need more instances that cater to specific interests as opposed to another general one.
If there is one I haven't seen it; I think there's naturally a bit more of a Linux crowd here though, maybe that's why there's less gaming content (yeah yeah "Linux can play games toooooo")