Does it actually matter?
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me defederation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
I’m on sh.itjust.works. Not gonna lie, related to that name naturally.
Exactly the same for me. Choosing an instance based on values, content, or location is so lame. I chose my instance based on the funny name.
Although sh.itjust.works democratic moderation is pretty based.
All that matters is you shouldn’t recommend the already massive overloaded servers like lemmy.world when lemmy isn’t even optimized for this sort of traffic on a single server yet, and those large servers are having issues because of it. The entire point of decentralization is to spread out and still be connected.
Recommend smaller general servers that have been up for years and also upgraded for the surge of users, like lemmy.one, lemm.ee, or vlemmy.net
For others…
If you’re Canadian lemmy.ca has also been great. There is an application but I was approved in less than 4 hours answering the 4 simple questions.
They’ve also recently rejigged the administration and just upgraded to a brand spanking fast server this canada day
Lenny.ca wouldn’t let me visit a lot of communities though
Like which?
Nerf
- Googled “Lemmy” to see what it even is
- “wtf is an instance”
- Checked some of the most used instances. At this point I wasn’t sure if it matters much, but I just figured it’s best to just pick a popular instance.
- found lemmy.world, and the description goes “The World’s Internet Frontpage - Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.”
- “sounds good enough”, created account
There is several of factors you should consider:
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Does it have a healthy amount of users: between 1k-10k users are probably the sweet spot right now. You don’t want too many users because it will cause performance problems. And instances with too few users has too many unknowns.
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read the rules see if you agree: servers can have wildy different rules ranging from no NSFW to no downvotes. If they don’t have any rules that is a red flag too. You want an active moderation so the instance doesn’t get run over by bots.
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Does it look low effort: check the banner, how the announcement formatted.
That is probably all the basics
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I’m on Feddit.de because it was recommended to me by join-lemmy.org and I like to have a server that has a German speaking Focus in the local feed.
I registered during very early days, so I signed up for the instance run by devs because there wasn’t much choice. Today I would choose a smaller one
Feddit.de because Deutschsprachig and I loved Reddit, but would love to see a successfully federated version of it.
I chose lemm.ee because:
- Its admin @sunaurus@lemm.ee has been working hard at improving the instance’s performance and fixing issues.
- It has been relatively smooth and performant since the infrastructure upgrade.
- The domain name is cleverly satisfying.
Yes. I realy enjoyed this instance so far. I joined during the black out protest and first looked at lemmy.me, but they said they had performance issues and didn’t realy want any new sign ups. Just scrolled for a bit and stumbled upon lemm.ee, with a beautiful welcome message and another massage how he upgraded the servers. Just new this was the way to go. Such a nice owner, who actually cares how our experience on this platform is.
Did you know that .ee is the Estonian tld? Estonia in Estonian is Eesti. Sunaurus is from Estonia and runs the c/Eesti community. The Estonian language is one of the few living relatives of the Finnish language (a member of the Finnic language family).
Thanks God
Do we do c/rimjobsteve here or should we leave that behind?
Do what makes you happy. Bring with you what you want, but remember this is a fresh start all the same :)
I didn’t know what I was doing so I chose at random.
Ditto. Can’t downvote on mine, apparently, but honestly that’s probably better for my mental health right now. It’s teaching me to just move on from stuff I don’t like, instead of pretending the little burst of negativity encompassed in my downvote actually accomplishes anything meaningful for me.
I’m the admin :p
Same
I created it myself.
Consider this a test to see if the federation works :)
It does!
Well, it looks like it is working.
My main one is on lemmy.ml and I’ll admit it was just the first one I saw. My second one is on lemmy.blahaj.zone in case something happens to the dev instance.
Lemmy.world here cause it seemed to be one of the top guns, and thought it mattered in the sense that I would see more content. But after learning about the fediverse I’ll most likely host my own instance soon 🤘
Same thought process here, but the performance issues I was seeing on lemmy.world prompted me to spin up my own instance right away. So far it’s been excellent performance-wise, but not quite the same as being a user on the instances that contain the content. We’ll see how it works out!
Yeah it does kinda matter, which is problematic for onboarding new users. Personally:
- I read the rules/TOS.
- I checked the Instances page to make sure instances I wanted to access were linked and not blocked.
- I looked for any introduction posts to see what the backend infrastructure was like.
- I checked the username I wanted was available.
It should not be that complicated, but it also has to be unfortunately. I had to make sure all those things matched what I personally wanted. This much choice is great for heavily-invested tech nerds with free time but sucks for anyone else wanting to join in.
