Lemmy.world because lemmy.ML recommended it when I tried to sign up there. I’m considering moving to a smaller server though since this one seems to be getting overloaded.
Check out lemm.ee - the dev seems to be on top of things. If you read the post by lemmy.world’s admin about fixing some issues, he/she actually credits lemm.ee for the fix so seems like you’re in good hands on that instance.
Yea, for whatever reason, lemmy.world became the sort of de facto "main" instance, which isn't a bad thing and lemmy.world isn't a bad choice at all, ruud AFAICT is a dedicated and experienced fediverse admin.
There may be issues to centralising the user load too much. I don't have the technical knowledge to back this up, but it probably makes sense that there is such a thing as too much for one server to handle. If it has to handle all of the user requests as well has syncing all of the large and popular communities that a "main" instance is likely to host, then it's just a lot and probably requires technical solutions and investment beyond what one admin/team is willing or capable of doing. Plus, lemmy the software may not be designed for that sort of load, which probably requires a distinct architecture from that of a smaller instance.
So it probably, at point at least, makes sense to spread the load of both the users and the communities. However, it seems that redditors as accustomed to a "central" and singular service as they are have kind of opted in to re-creating a central "main" instance like they're used to. It may very well be a bad habit, as it presumes that there's just some giant server and a dedicated tech team sitting there waiting to scale up at a moment's notice. Of course, lemmy.world are free to halt sign ups and encourage users to pick other instances. But it remains to be seen how lemmy, its software and the fediverse/threadiverse in general handles communities/groups/magazines at this new scale.
In the mean time, intentionally spreading the load might help. As would donating to the developers and your admin!!
For a big instance getting an over-sized user base ... roughly how many would that be and what could the instance do about it? I'd imagine a number of infrastructural things could be done before the core lemmy code base and design needs to be substantially changed or redesigned. Big separate database service, big beefy primary server/instance or even a cluster like kubernetes (which is what mastodon.social use AFAIK).
As for the alternative where many users are distributed more even across many instances, how well would that or can that scale with all of the community data that would need to be synced up between all the instances? From what I've gathered, it's precise this kind of work that's plagued lemmy.world somewhat and caused some of the issues that users have been having, largely, it seems, from the server being overloaded with "federation workers" timing out.
I can’t answer those questions because some active work would need to be done to get those insights, but those are the right questions to ask indeed.
I think my immediate assumption would be that the scale metrics that could end up starving resources would be something like: number of users on the current instance, number of posts on the current instance, number of comments on the current instance, number of new signups per minute on the current instance, number of new posts per minute on the current instance, number of new comments per minute on the current instance, number of total posts across all federated communities, number of total comments across all federated communities, number of new posts per minute across all federated communities, number of new comments per minute across all federated communities. That’s my list and I could be wrong about it since I know almost nothing about the underlying architecture, it would take a bit of team work to make it comprehensive.
From there, someone architect-level who knows the solution well should be able to prioritize that list. For instance: “the number of federated posts doesn’t concern me much, because we fetch the contents themselves directly from other instances, and if the concern is the size of the DB table, the number of comments will hit much higher much earlier anyway; so let’s look at comment stuff before we look at post stuff”. I have no idea if this is accurate, but you get the idea.
And then from there, you want to perform some load-testing. So, for instance, setting up two air-gapped test instance that can only federate each other, and injecting a ton of fake data to hit higher and higher numbers on the listed metrics. While that’s going on, all relevant resource usage (CPU, memory, …) would be monitored, to see what resource usages grow faster than comfortable.
With those results, you’d want to go back to current resource usage on real-world instances, and that should allow to extrapolate and prioritize. Like: “well, lemmy.world’s local posts are growing at that rate, and we’ve measured that the related metric only gets in trouble around that number, so basically at current rate we have 6 months to figure it out”.
And from there, you now know the problems, and can prioritize the solutions, based on urgency and cost. Some may be low-cost, there may be easy computations to parallelize or shard for instance; but of course you’d have to know what the worst ones are first, in order to tackle them in order. And then of course, some of them will probably be very tricky to get past.
One thing I can tell you is that, without knowing much of Lemmy’s architecture, I have the same intuition you do, that the decentralization of it will help mitigate with some resource usages in ways that Reddit couldn’t, for instance; but not all. I’m pretty sure that as instances add content, something grows in ALL instances federating that content, which might starve some critical resource at some point in all of them.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
I choose lemmy.world because it let me create an account nothing more. When RIF closed up, they suggested Lemmy, so I popped on. I am sure it will be a while before there is a lot of content, but I can be patient. I do hope that Reddit enjoys the fruits of the bitterness they've sown. The Anti-social network.
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).
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.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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."
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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.
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.
Does it look low effort: check the banner, how the announcement formatted.
I chose Lemmy.world, because it was the one I was hearing the most about.
It's a bit slow at the moment, but that's not surprising, given the amount of new users.
So far it's been fun. I really hope more and more people show up!
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
I'm also on SDF. They've been in the business of offering free computing resources to the public since the 80s. So I feel confident that they won't close up shop due to lack of expertise or resources.
I joined lemmy.world because when I first signed up it was still quite a bit smaller than lemmy.ml. I heard that new users should try to make lemmy grow horizontally by joining other instances. I guess joining world wasn't the best choice for achieving that in retrospect 🙂
The final update message given out on RIF suggested Lemmy.World and so, here I am.
Does it matter?
As I have found with a few niches I've been looking for and only found communities on other instances, it may matter. I can see this post even though I am on Lemmy.World and not Lemmy.ml; but some of the other places I've wanted to look at are not federated with Lemmy.World or are semi-private and require manual authorization by an admin before you can do anything; and they can't authorize a user that doesn't interact with them somehow so I had to make a new account for those instances.
I picked sh.itjust.works because it's Canadian and the domain name is nerdy enough. It seems to be a decent instance, although I'll move if I stop liking it.
Does it matter? With all of the defederation drama, I think it does. If your instance is quick to drop others, it seems like you'll lose content.
AFAIU we're still federated with some of the douchier instances and I appreciate seeing their memes and posts. Not because they're entertaining, but because it's easier to understand the asshats. When they creep into racism/phobias/hate I'll be fine seeing them go.
I didn't realise that one was Canadian as well. It did love the name as it vibes with my exact feelings as I've explored lemmy instances and this whole concept. Endd up at lemmy.ca as that .ca domain just sold it for me
I feel like Canadian instances are just a polite veneer on US communities. Like, 99% of the posts are from US communities/instances anyway, so it doesn't make a big difference. 🤷
I joined Lemmy a few weeks ago when a lot of other reddit refugees were making the switch. A lot of the servers were overloaded, so I just went ahead and hosted my own. My instance is never overloaded because I'm the only user, and because Lemmy is federated I can subscribe to communities on any instance I want.
Signed up this account on .world because it was quite small (lol) but seemed competently run. This decision has not worked out great!
Had my other account on Beehaw so after that whole debacle I had to migrate. Moved that one to lemm.ee because again small and competently run. It's worked out much better over there, people seem to keep flocking to .world for whatever reason so lemm.ee is staying nice and manageable (for now).
Both lemmy.world and lemm.ee seem to be run by communicative people with sysadmin experience, which is really what you need for an instance to grow steadily in the long-term.
It was after the u/spez shit AMA.
Wanted Beehawsomething but saw they were restrictive and I had to give a detailed reason to join them, so I didn't.
Sh.itjust.works seemed like a website name I would not remember and I wouldn't be able to go too
Lemmy.ml was full and we where invited to go to other places
Lemmy.world was there and had a nice name, it was for me
Now I discovered only 2 days ago that slrpnk.net existed, and If we were able to move instance I would move there, I vibes a lot with the ideals I discovered on Reddit, they even got me to buy plants I take very good care of
It's never too late to just create a new account and start using it. Don't feel like you're stuck on an instance. Your old posts won't move over but that's a problem even Mastodon hasn't been able to solve yet. And unlike them there is no concept of followers in Lemmy so you're really not losing anything beyond the time of re-subscribing to all your communities.
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 🤘
Lemmy.world didn't require/disapprove my application!
I wrote in the beehaw application that I'd contribute empathy, humor, comments, and memes. I feel like a rejected tinder date in denial, "maybe their servers just have a lot going on right now"
I was going to choose sopuli.xyz but you need to give them a reason to why you want there and I never heard back from them and logging in does nothing, so I assume I was not selected. I say it would be fair if there was some message to go f myself so that I wouldn't be held in eternal limbo.
So I chose lemmy.world as it's a general purpose instance and immediate registry.
When I got started on Lemmy, there were only a handful of instances and they were all general-purpose. I went and made my own so that it was exactly what I wanted.
I don't think it really matters, but I picked vlemmy.net because it wasn't too big. I figured that the bigger ones were staring down the barrel of a huge influx in traffic, so I wanted to avoid them.
I didn't see any evidence of the admin being shady, but also wasn't too hasty with the defederate button.
I chose vlemmy.net for the exact same reason, too. Also it was the top instance on https://join-lemmy.org/instances the day I wanted to join another instance (I was on lemmy.ml then).
Wanted to be on a reasonably big instance, since I figure they're more likely to stick around in the long run. Lemmy.ml was closed for registration at the time (might still be, idk), and plus I have some disagreements with the admins, so I chose lemmy.world. I'm pretty happy here and don't see a reason to change personally, although the server's getting pretty overloaded recently so we'll see.
Decided to go with a smaller instance from the start, as I think we can all see what happens when one entity holds too much power within an ecosystem.
Also wanted to go with one that was not defederated from other instances (nor defederating others as well). Checked a bunch of lists, and decided to go with my current one.
Surprised I'm not seeing any other self-hosters in here. Having seen the de-federation drama, it's nice to know that I can federate with anyone I want, regardless of if they are federating with eachother.
Obviously it comes with the administration side of things, but I really don't mind.
I definitely forgot to add a password file when I upgraded through ansible and locked myself out of the DB. Also locked myself out with the private instance + federation setting combo. Still enjoying it, though!
I was looking for a lemmy instance that would let me create communities, downvote if I wanted to downvote, and that would take care of troublemakers without being too overly restrictive.
I also wanted to ease the burden on the very busy lemmy instances that were being overwhelmed by the reddit Exodus.
It seems I have found a place. The SDF has a very long history of serving several communities in the internet and Linux world. I first ran into them decades ago, and they are still here.
I picked lemmy.world because it was recommended and had a large userbase. I know Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjustwor.ks, so if you want to interact with that community, that could be a consideration against, but since the user population across all of Lemmy is currently increasing dramatically, I think everything's a bit of a moving target regardless.
Tried lemmy.world as a reddit refugee but with the performance issues they're experiencing, quickly went looking for another instance with better performance and a decent amount of extra content. Lemmy.ml is blocked at work (.ml TLD is freenom so prone to abuse) and registration is closed anyway, so decided on lemm.ee.
Far better speed, a good amount of content locally, and few/no errors at the moment.
Lemmy.world got a lot more usable today. Idk if they addressed issues with resources or enough people left and went elsewhere. I definitely experienced some initial frustration I also made an account at lemm.ee but I have been sticking with my first dot-world one for now.
Exactly the same. Created an account on Lemmy.ml about a month ago but can't login today. So I created another account with the same username on lemm.ee just now and it works fine.
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.ml - Signed up here first, was recommended to it as a general place to sign up to
•Lemmy.blahaj.zone - Egg memes, blåhaj memes, just memes
•Lemmy.world - Handy for extra world news communities
•Lemmynsfw.com - Do I need to explain. This is under a different name, but I've kinda used that name over on the other place and I'm slowly bringing my content over (plus new stuff)
Yeah, but there's at least one community I've found that's on an instance that have defederated my main, so what I posted there the other day gained zero traction, and only found out the reason last night (re-found the community through Mastodon and couldn't see my own post). So having alt accounts for those edge cases is my thinking
Plus I post sightly different things on my nsfw account compared to this one 🤣
Was the most upvoted comment on "how to get started with Lemmy". Also, some of these other places have super strange names, I get that it doesn't matter but when you know nothing it gives bad vibes.
I've got accounts on 4 different instances just to see what things are like. Sometimes I want to see all sorts of posts, sometimes I want a feed of just LGBT-positive stuff, sometimes I just want to get off, different accounts on different instances for different things :)
LGBT instance by default is lemmy.blahaj.zone. Other instances such as Beehaw are highly acceptant and supportive as they have admins who are LGBT themselves. I'd recommend the former especially.
First I made one on ml. Then I made one on kbin because everyone said ml was a bunch of tankies and had some shady shit going on. Then none of the apps supported kbin so now I made one on world. Lol and I have no idea which one between world and ml I'm even posting from right now since I'm logged into both on liftoff
Sadly not, it's gonna be manual for the time being so if you're thinking about it it's probably worth doing before you have hundreds of subscriptions.
That said, I've gone through it once already on my other account and in the desktop browser it was fine, just involved opening lots of tabs and a bit of copy paste, took about ten minutes for a fairly extensive sub list. But I pity anyone trying to do it on mobile.
I do not have a link so this isn't very helpful but yesterday I saw someone posted that they had made something to do exactly this. I wish I could remember what community I saw it in. You may have to do some digging. Knew I should've saved it...
I'd heard you shouldn't pick one of the largest, I explicitly didn't want a server run by Nazis, Paleolibertarians, or Marxist-Leninists, and I didn't mind the rules here.
I found beehaw first, so I started there but then discovered that the admins manage the community creation there. So I made a new account on lemmy.world to mod that, and most browsed with my beehaw account. But then beehaw needed to de-federate from lemmy.world, so I made a vLemmy and lemmy.one accounts so I could interact with both beehaw and lemmy.world.
tl;dr As someone else mentioned, finding a smaller, low-profile instance to have your home account but interacting with other instances seems to be the best approach
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.
I chose Aussie.zone cause I'm out of touch with my own country so seeing the news here is nice and cause I thought it would be easier to join a country instance.
Also optional email and I know I could make a temp email but I can't be bothered.
So I joined lemmy.world because I use to be a user of reddit is fun, rip, and in their going away message they mentioned .world. So I joined that instance not realizing how the fediverse works.
Overall what I've seen is the instance you join determines your "front page" since by default it will be set to show local communities. Other than that subscribe to any community from any instance then set your front page to show "subscribed" or "all" and you get your basic Reddit experience
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 run my own private instance so I am in control over my own data.
Tbh, I don’t think it matters what server you choose. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and Beehaw seem to be the big ones so picking a server that federates with those would be ideal.
I was planning to sign up at BeeHaw because it seems pretty active and with high quality discussions. When I heard that it had defederated from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world I decided not to sign up to any of those three as I would rather have access to all of them (though I can understand why BeeHaw defederated). So I just went with VLemmy.net as it was one of the recommended ones (on join-lemmy.org and the Awesome-Lemmy-Instances GitHub) and seems to be very broadly federated.
I don't think it matters too much, though I think if you were signed up on the same instances as all your favourite communities it would be a bit more convenient.
This means beehaw will not see any content from the servers they defederated from, effectively preventing trolls and toxic users from harassing people in beehaw.
Well, I started my instance so it only makes sense that its also my home!
As for why I started an instance, I've always liked self-hosting stuff as its been one of the best ways I learn how stuff on the internet works, even more than I have learnt from doing some programming in my spare time. So it was an obvious move for me since I wanted to know more about how ActivityPub worked.
Originally I wasn't really planning on having open registration on my instance (otherwise I would've picked a better domain name, a bit late for that now) however as I saw Lemmy pick up pace, and the larger servers were starting to have issues, I figured that the best way I could give back was at least offer to share the load.
The Admin of my instance (discuss.tchncs.de) is tolerant but understands the tolerance paradox. (Defderated with exploding heads but not every left instance - doesn't fall for false balance.
I have two. I have this one (lemmy.ml) as my broad-access instance.
My other is lemmygrad, but as that is a bit more widely blocked I keep this one still. That one is used for most of my politics, and this one is my more general interest. It's kind of nice to have different communities died to different user registrations.
As to why those two in particular, I am a Marxist-Leninist so...yeah.
I read some comments that lemmy.ca was well run to the extent that it was being recommended even by non-Canadians. Being Canadian myself, that was good enough for me.
It's a friendly instance and is well-run. The admin manually approved registrations which kept them safe from the great bot invasion and is now upgrading the server and bringing on more admins.
I'm into general instances and also a long time user of Fediverse, so I know 10-200 user instances work best. That's why I picked the first one with not too many and not too little users (the join-lemmy page only showed 50 new users when I registered, damn)
I tried to find a server that isn't blocking anyone, and hasn't been defederated by any of the big servers.
I want to avoid an echo-chamber and have access to everything on the fediverse, including stuff I find distateful. If anything really bothers me I will block the community/instance myself, I don't want others making that choice for me.
Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of folks out there just searching for an excuse to clutch their pearls, rile up a mob, and defederate anything and everything that offends them.
I don't want to circlejerk in a safe space echo chamber, I want to see both the yin and the yang of humanity. I want that wild west feeling of the internet of old
I shall inform you of a secret. There are some big servers around that don't defederate anything and aren't defederated by anyone. :) that's all I'm saying, it's up to you to find the treasure.
My tool is bugged, and lemm.ee does defederate instances, so be aware of that and maybe use what my tool uses instead of my tool if you want reliable output :)
Bouncing between several since lemmy.world is being hammered right now, I'm sure once the dust settles things will calm down. Right now I'm on infosec.pub because it was recommended to me as a smaller server. It really doesn't matter so long as whatever you're on communicates with everyone else.
It's kind of a pain when different accounts have different subscriptions. Do you know a good way to sync them up? (Either a one time import or continuously)
The easiest thing to do is open one account's subscriptions in one browser window, the other account's subscriptions in the other, then work through them. It doesn't take too long but I wouldn't want to do it very often.
Made one on lemmy.world but it's crumbling under the pressure as we speak. Tried a local one, but it has like 5 users. Don't trust it to live long enough. So started using the star trek one, because star trek. Not as if you'd need any other reason
I'm here! I read some disappointing stuff about the creator of it, but I'm not on Lemmy for the personality-worship. If it works, that's all I need.
I'm hoping it eventually allows downvoting and community creation, but I understand leaving that out at least while it deals with the waves of new users.
I tried a few, at one point a few weeks ago I thought I would stick with lemmy.world because (then) it wasn't the most popular instance and seemed to have good resources... but then it became the most popular instance and got defederated by beehaw (and I was subscribed to a few beehaw communities). So I signed up to feddit.uk just because I'm from the UK and it seemed solid. I think if you have no strong niche interest then picking one made for your region/country is a pretty good bet.
Was initially on lemmy.zip because it seemed really chill and that was such a cool instance name. I had no problems with it whatsoever but I realised it didn't block out certain instances that I disliked (aka lemmygrad). Now I'm on lemmy.fmhy.ml and I'm loving it so far since it had everything I needed:
Blocks out lemmygrad
Allows talk on piracy and NSFW content
Loads better compared to the more overpopulated instances
Wasn't very restrictive and was very welcoming (didn't even ask me for a reason for joining)
I joined latte.isnot.coffee because its description said it was specifically for Reddit refugees. I'm a little worried it may be run by pro-CCP tankies, though.
I joined lemmy.ca because I like to keep a diet of local news and a place to avoid American influence. I like using my local feed for well the local stuff and then my subscriptions for all the niche interests that the Canadian community couldn't sustain alone.
I signed up with beehaw first, but realized that they were defederated from lemmygrad, which I wanted access to. As I became more acquainted with lemmy and started looking into the "flavors" of the different instances, I joined lemmy.ml because they are unapologetic communists and won't defederate with lemmygrad.
As an aside, it's fucking insane to me that lemmygrad is so controversial yet there's crickets about exploding-heads and people are happy to be on instances that don't block them. Cool
do things from your home instance, so once you find a community on another instance you want on your home instance, go to your home instance and search ![email protected] eg ![email protected] and itl will pull in a few posts to start off, if you subscribe to that remote community hen your home instance will keep on getting posts.
I first applied to Lemmy.ml because I was interested in open source. I also applied at Lemmy.one and Beehaw because they were recommended on join-lemmy.
I got accepted at Beehaw. Then they defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.it. Stayed on Beehaw for a while but found a few communities on world that I couldn’t join, so decided to sign up to world.
World was having performance issues and I realised I could no longer interact with the Beehaw communities and people I had started talking with.
Then found lemm.ee I like the name, it hadn’t been defederated by any other instances, had good up time, was on the latest Lemmy code, and the admin seemed to know what they were doing, so joined that one. I don’t see myself moving again any time soon.
On the day I signed up, 18.0 was rolling out and lemmy.one was the only one that worked on Jerboa. I wanted to try out the different apps and see what worked well so that was where I started. I also have an account on lemmy.world but I don't think it's necessary unless there's a problem with lemmy.one. might still use another server if I can create my own community there.
The one I use doesn't block other instances, although I probably will block the same instances and people that big instances already block, I want to be the one to make that choice and shape the content I see.
I don't remember the instance I am currently on, but I do remember that the main Lemmy instance I found was probably too full with people performing a mass exodus to it.
Lemmy user for a couple of days here. I jumped on lemmy.world because it was big and the name suggested it was universal and open, it had open registration and allows nsfw content.
I suffered through the technical issues many of us experienced, but everything seems much better and smoother now (maybe because they were able to fix the issues, or maybe because enough people left because of them, I can't say!)
Does it matter what you use? Yes and no, I guess. Apparently the last few days performance issues were mostly local to dot-world. I did make another profile on lemm.ee and I noticed the different instances seem to show different feeds with some different content, but also many of the same posts from the same communities as well. I'm still trying to figure out how they decide what they show in their feeds. Something to do with federation, I guess, but I'm not pretending to understand the meaning of that concept yet. Given that instances can choose to federated or defederate, it seems like it must matter to some extent what instance you are on even though content can be shared between instances.
Basically, you saw different posts on each instance's local feed because they dont always federate with the exact same servers, one may be blocked on one instance or not yet discovered
it does matter what instance you're on when your instance starts getting defederated by others - so far i know a lot of servers defederated lemmygrad and explodingheads for political extremism, and beehaw blocked shitjustworks and lemmy.world because of bots
I signed up with lemmy.ml originally, but then it was a little hugged to death. I couldn't update my community, couldn't post pictures or anything and I kept getting errors. I tried Beehaw but you can't make your own community and that was a no go for me. Then they defederated.
I went through the list that was only like 10 servers or something at the time, found slrpnk.net which had the vibes of the subreddit I run and found a new home for NoLawns. The guy who runs it seems pretty cool when I had to reach out to him so I've made it my home.
I did also just make a kbin the other day to see what that's all about too but with no app (yet there's a few in the works), I've stuck here.
I signed up at Redditthat.com as it was listed as a recommend instance. I didn't want to overcomplicate the choice. If this instance doesn't fit my needs, I can still create another account somewhere else.
For some reason I couldn't join lemmy.world and few other popular instances, be it because of technical issues, load, idk. I joined sh.itjust.works because I wanted to check fediverse before I commit to host my own instance, which I probably will at some point.
Even lemmy.word, at least for me, was difficult to join. I have a hard time to log into the account I have created there. I think we must understand this is not redit, the platform is fundamentally different how you approach it. The fuller the server gets, the more difficult it gets to get into your account.
I wonder if it'd be possible to setup a registration server of some sort instead of only picking instances manually? Ideally it'd know if one particular server was near capacity and could direct new user registrations to another.
I have no idea how this sort of platform functions, just spitballing.
I don't think it is necessary, as @navordar mentioned, just pick a smaller server, maybe have two or three accounts on different servers for now might work, unless you are willing to host an instance that will help grow the federated network.
Hosting your instance, might require some commitment, good admin skills and transparency.
I am inspired how the arch Linux community handles their admin for projects, I believe whoever hosts a instance that follow the same philosophy, that instance might stay active for a very long time.
I want something spread out from a maint instance, and is relevant to me, so I went with Midwest.social.
I also knew about their mastodon track record, which helps me feel secure knowing it's a good instance
It does seem like some servers have specific niches, so if you're really interested in a specific servers niche using that instance would prevent you from having to sync those communities with your instance.
I think you’re right! It can be nice to have an active local feed with topics you’re interested in, so that’s a good reason to pick a topical instance (eg mander.xyz or slrpnk.net).
Nobody asked my opinion but my interpretation of how this whole fediverse "should" work is that while there can be empirical instances, federation shines with smaller, easy to manage instances thst connect to each other.
Lemmy.ml was requesting people register on other instances, and lemmy.one stepped up to fill the void.
But when people ask me what instance to sign up for, I tell them lemmy.world. it doesn't really matter, but being based in a bigger instance reduces the friction of finding communities.
I initially had no idea how to select an instance or what that would impact, so I joined a random one but didn't take long to realize that the instance doesn't have much activity and most of what it does have is about truckers. Nothing against truckers but that isn't super applicable to me. After messing around a little I also realized that it's possible the server will just disappear, which could happen to any of them but I thought a larger instance might have more staying power (or maybe not I really have no idea).
I use lemmy.ml because i found it has a large user-base. I also like programming.dev and ideally i would like to see all the posts from the one and the other instance into one :)
I followed advice that said to avoid big instances due to possible instability, but also avoid tiny instances because you don't want them to shut down. So I was looking for something decent size, but not huge. I also wanted to minimize defederation so I could make my own decisions on blocking. I narrowed it down to three. Since I'm 13 deep down, I landed on sh.itjust.works.
Initially made an account with the instance opened after my country's subreddit made the shift, but on Jerboa trying to look at other instance content was really rough.
So I joined here since I enjoy the content, and raise the black flag every so often.
Well there are different rules on different servers, for a start. Which ones they're federated with can potentially make a big difference.
And then of course if you're just relying on All, you'll miss out on stuff that a bigger server might see because nobody from yours has subbed to it yet. But that's sorting itself out over time, and you can always speed up the process by making sure to regularly do a trawl for new interesting communities to pull in with a tool like lemmyverse.net/communities. Absolutely not a reason to sign up on a big server, just a reason to be more proactive if you're on a smaller one.
Wait... ugh, someone needs to make a cute little graphics animation to explain this shit.
I'm on lemmy.ml. When I choose to see "all," is that just listing communities that other users on lemmy.ml subscribed to?? I thought it listed content from all other servers connected/federated with lemmy.ml??
It's posts from all the communities lemmy.ml knows about, as opposed to all of the communities everywhere in existence. Given enough people and time the two lists end up being basically the same but obviously during a period of rapid growth like right now, new communities are popping up every second so it's gonna take a little while until all the major instances know about them.
Tools like lemmyverse.net let you keyword search communities based on your interests so you can find new things to sub to. If you're the first to do so from lemmy.ml, congrats, your server now knows about that community and everyone else on there will start seeing posts from it in All.
I knew picking from the popular sources will provide a slow experience, so I went to a GitHub repository and picked the shortest domain from the recommended section.
I chose mine because it disallows NSFW on its own communities and takes a hard stance against defederation while not being defederated. I want to have more control over my feed and not be isolated.
It federates with the servers that have some stuff I want access to on them, and it also has rules against being a huge douche. And it's supported by Jerboa.
That's pretty much it. Mix of convenience and what passes for my moral scruples.
Initially I sign up for beehaw because it was the first one recommended on the sign up page. They defederated from some instances, so I made another account with lemmyworld. They had issues that made them incompatible with the app I was using (mobile user only), so I now have an account with lemme. Three accounts, I swap around based on which one is working best on that particular day.
It actually matter. Initially I choose .world, they run by nice and competent people but the surge of users is simply too much. It makes experience there is subpar with slow response due to high load and high latency due to distance (.world hosted in europe, I live in SEA). I then migrated lemmy.my.id, and the experience is improved a lot as the server is nearer and the users still few.
I'm hosting my own. I had a free server with 9GB RAM and 99GB disk space, and it was only running my Mastodon server until now. I like the freedom to do what I want with the server :)
I tried to join programming.dev but they were having a tech problem. I wanted to join them because I learned about lemmy through the programee space. I hopped to lemmy.world and then immediately realized that was a bad idea for future stability. It was leggy and the flood hadn't even begun. Then I learned about sh.itjust.works and I picked it for stability reasons and having a decent amount of users. I stayed because I'm digging it for now and it was totally stable through the flood.
lemmy.ml because when I joined I had no idea of how the fediverse worked. I'd change it to a smaller one but it really doesn't matter much I don't think.
I went with ReddThat as the past tense seemed apt. Also it's a small enough instance not to feel overwhelming, while being large enough to provide content.
Was looking for a smaller instance which doesn't block many instances so I don't risk having an instance I want to see blocked. By the way I also use Arch
Lemmy.world because lemmy.ML recommended it when I tried to sign up there. I’m considering moving to a smaller server though since this one seems to be getting overloaded.
Same, feeling really slow for me
Check out lemm.ee - the dev seems to be on top of things. If you read the post by lemmy.world’s admin about fixing some issues, he/she actually credits lemm.ee for the fix so seems like you’re in good hands on that instance.
lemm.ee is really awesome. Thank you, admin!
Yea, for whatever reason, lemmy.world became the sort of de facto "main" instance, which isn't a bad thing and lemmy.world isn't a bad choice at all, ruud AFAICT is a dedicated and experienced fediverse admin.
There may be issues to centralising the user load too much. I don't have the technical knowledge to back this up, but it probably makes sense that there is such a thing as too much for one server to handle. If it has to handle all of the user requests as well has syncing all of the large and popular communities that a "main" instance is likely to host, then it's just a lot and probably requires technical solutions and investment beyond what one admin/team is willing or capable of doing. Plus, lemmy the software may not be designed for that sort of load, which probably requires a distinct architecture from that of a smaller instance.
So it probably, at point at least, makes sense to spread the load of both the users and the communities. However, it seems that redditors as accustomed to a "central" and singular service as they are have kind of opted in to re-creating a central "main" instance like they're used to. It may very well be a bad habit, as it presumes that there's just some giant server and a dedicated tech team sitting there waiting to scale up at a moment's notice. Of course, lemmy.world are free to halt sign ups and encourage users to pick other instances. But it remains to be seen how lemmy, its software and the fediverse/threadiverse in general handles communities/groups/magazines at this new scale.
In the mean time, intentionally spreading the load might help. As would donating to the developers and your admin!!
I have the technical knowledge to back it up, and I confirm your understanding is spot on.
Thanks!
Can we pick your brain on this?
For a big instance getting an over-sized user base ... roughly how many would that be and what could the instance do about it? I'd imagine a number of infrastructural things could be done before the core lemmy code base and design needs to be substantially changed or redesigned. Big separate database service, big beefy primary server/instance or even a cluster like kubernetes (which is what mastodon.social use AFAIK).
As for the alternative where many users are distributed more even across many instances, how well would that or can that scale with all of the community data that would need to be synced up between all the instances? From what I've gathered, it's precise this kind of work that's plagued lemmy.world somewhat and caused some of the issues that users have been having, largely, it seems, from the server being overloaded with "federation workers" timing out.
I can’t answer those questions because some active work would need to be done to get those insights, but those are the right questions to ask indeed.
I think my immediate assumption would be that the scale metrics that could end up starving resources would be something like: number of users on the current instance, number of posts on the current instance, number of comments on the current instance, number of new signups per minute on the current instance, number of new posts per minute on the current instance, number of new comments per minute on the current instance, number of total posts across all federated communities, number of total comments across all federated communities, number of new posts per minute across all federated communities, number of new comments per minute across all federated communities. That’s my list and I could be wrong about it since I know almost nothing about the underlying architecture, it would take a bit of team work to make it comprehensive.
From there, someone architect-level who knows the solution well should be able to prioritize that list. For instance: “the number of federated posts doesn’t concern me much, because we fetch the contents themselves directly from other instances, and if the concern is the size of the DB table, the number of comments will hit much higher much earlier anyway; so let’s look at comment stuff before we look at post stuff”. I have no idea if this is accurate, but you get the idea.
And then from there, you want to perform some load-testing. So, for instance, setting up two air-gapped test instance that can only federate each other, and injecting a ton of fake data to hit higher and higher numbers on the listed metrics. While that’s going on, all relevant resource usage (CPU, memory, …) would be monitored, to see what resource usages grow faster than comfortable.
With those results, you’d want to go back to current resource usage on real-world instances, and that should allow to extrapolate and prioritize. Like: “well, lemmy.world’s local posts are growing at that rate, and we’ve measured that the related metric only gets in trouble around that number, so basically at current rate we have 6 months to figure it out”.
And from there, you now know the problems, and can prioritize the solutions, based on urgency and cost. Some may be low-cost, there may be easy computations to parallelize or shard for instance; but of course you’d have to know what the worst ones are first, in order to tackle them in order. And then of course, some of them will probably be very tricky to get past.
One thing I can tell you is that, without knowing much of Lemmy’s architecture, I have the same intuition you do, that the decentralization of it will help mitigate with some resource usages in ways that Reddit couldn’t, for instance; but not all. I’m pretty sure that as instances add content, something grows in ALL instances federating that content, which might starve some critical resource at some point in all of them.
Yeah I’ve noticed some issues lately with lemmy.world. I assume it has to do the quick growth from the great Reddit migration.
lemmy.world has literally doubled its number of active users in the past few days, so yeah it's a pretty safe bet.
Welcome to the $bigProvider to Fediverse Migration Experience. This is how everyone starts off their journey.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
Went Lemmy.world because I had no idea how any of this worked.
Gonna stick with it for now, because there isn’t really a reason to switch. In the future I might switch or host my own.
I choose lemmy.world because it let me create an account nothing more. When RIF closed up, they suggested Lemmy, so I popped on. I am sure it will be a while before there is a lot of content, but I can be patient. I do hope that Reddit enjoys the fruits of the bitterness they've sown. The Anti-social network.
I chose lemm.ee because:
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?
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.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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 federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I'm to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
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 federation 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.
There is several of factors you should consider:
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.
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.
Does it look low effort: check the banner, how the announcement formatted.
That is probably all the basics
I chose Lemmy.world, because it was the one I was hearing the most about. It's a bit slow at the moment, but that's not surprising, given the amount of new users. So far it's been fun. I really hope more and more people show up!
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
I'm on lemmy.sdf.org because it's widely federated and run by a trustworthy organization.
I'm not much of a tech bro - in fact I struggle with troubleshooting basic Linux issues. That's why I mostly interact outside of my local instance.
I hardly engage with the techy discussion on SDF, but I appreciate the high quality user base.
I'm also on SDF. They've been in the business of offering free computing resources to the public since the 80s. So I feel confident that they won't close up shop due to lack of expertise or resources.
I was going to come in here and praise SDF but I see I'm too late
Damn you Dark Souls Remastered for taking me away from Lemmy for a bit!
I guess I'll link the FAQ for SDF here for anyone interested in learning more
and also mention that SDF runs a Mastodon and Pixelfed instance for all your federation needs
I'm also late to the party. But I've been on SDF for ages so I always try out everything they offer.
I joined lemmy.world because when I first signed up it was still quite a bit smaller than lemmy.ml. I heard that new users should try to make lemmy grow horizontally by joining other instances. I guess joining world wasn't the best choice for achieving that in retrospect 🙂
The final update message given out on RIF suggested Lemmy.World and so, here I am.
As I have found with a few niches I've been looking for and only found communities on other instances, it may matter. I can see this post even though I am on Lemmy.World and not Lemmy.ml; but some of the other places I've wanted to look at are not federated with Lemmy.World or are semi-private and require manual authorization by an admin before you can do anything; and they can't authorize a user that doesn't interact with them somehow so I had to make a new account for those instances.
I'm the admin :p
Same
I'm in Canada, so I'm using and supporting Lemmy.ca
One of the points of using a distributed system is to not centralize the userbase.
I also have a account on lemmynsfw but that's just for research purposes.
I picked sh.itjust.works because it's Canadian and the domain name is nerdy enough. It seems to be a decent instance, although I'll move if I stop liking it.
Does it matter? With all of the defederation drama, I think it does. If your instance is quick to drop others, it seems like you'll lose content.
AFAIU we're still federated with some of the douchier instances and I appreciate seeing their memes and posts. Not because they're entertaining, but because it's easier to understand the asshats. When they creep into racism/phobias/hate I'll be fine seeing them go.
I also chose it for the renewable energy server.
And it's fun to 🛑 conversations that devolved into American politics BS, and remind users this is a Canadian instance.
Maybe voting takes a while, but I view it as the Japanese government in Shin Godzilla.
Doing things the right way takes longer and can be painful sure....but marathon vs sprint.
The Agora was a great idea IMO. One of the reasons I like it here.
I didn't realise that one was Canadian as well. It did love the name as it vibes with my exact feelings as I've explored lemmy instances and this whole concept. Endd up at lemmy.ca as that .ca domain just sold it for me
I feel like Canadian instances are just a polite veneer on US communities. Like, 99% of the posts are from US communities/instances anyway, so it doesn't make a big difference. 🤷
lemm.ee because of speed and latest version of Lemmy. Less problems, good experience 🙂
Just switched to lemm.ee from .world yesterday. The speed really makes a difference 😯
It is really awesome instance. Admin made incredible work ❤️
I did the same thing today. Everything seems smoother.
I chose lemmy.ca because I'm a proud Canadian patriot 💪🇨🇦🫡
Same here. Just seemed like the right choice.
I joined Lemmy a few weeks ago when a lot of other reddit refugees were making the switch. A lot of the servers were overloaded, so I just went ahead and hosted my own. My instance is never overloaded because I'm the only user, and because Lemmy is federated I can subscribe to communities on any instance I want.
Just wait until the Lemmy Civil War happens.
I can't wait for the Ken Burns documentary
Signed up this account on .world because it was quite small (lol) but seemed competently run. This decision has not worked out great!
Had my other account on Beehaw so after that whole debacle I had to migrate. Moved that one to lemm.ee because again small and competently run. It's worked out much better over there, people seem to keep flocking to .world for whatever reason so lemm.ee is staying nice and manageable (for now).
I had the same thought process.
Both lemmy.world and lemm.ee seem to be run by communicative people with sysadmin experience, which is really what you need for an instance to grow steadily in the long-term.
Absolutely, and it's great to see them working together to improve things as a whole rather than just building up their own little fiefdoms.
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 chose lemm.ee because it came highly recommended and rightfully so. Great management and great communities too
Why is it highly recommended? And do you know where it is hosted?
It came highly recommended because it’s a fast server under food management. I have no idea where it’s hosted 😊
It was after the u/spez shit AMA. Wanted Beehawsomething but saw they were restrictive and I had to give a detailed reason to join them, so I didn't. Sh.itjust.works seemed like a website name I would not remember and I wouldn't be able to go too Lemmy.ml was full and we where invited to go to other places Lemmy.world was there and had a nice name, it was for me Now I discovered only 2 days ago that slrpnk.net existed, and If we were able to move instance I would move there, I vibes a lot with the ideals I discovered on Reddit, they even got me to buy plants I take very good care of
It's never too late to just create a new account and start using it. Don't feel like you're stuck on an instance. Your old posts won't move over but that's a problem even Mastodon hasn't been able to solve yet. And unlike them there is no concept of followers in Lemmy so you're really not losing anything beyond the time of re-subscribing to all your communities.
I'm a dirty hippy and this seemed like a server for other dirty hippies
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 🤘
I wanted a server that had fast posting and browsing
Then I learned that some of the larger servers aren't federating with each other, which made me happy I went this route
https://wirebase.org, FYI
Lemmy.world didn't require/disapprove my application!
I wrote in the beehaw application that I'd contribute empathy, humor, comments, and memes. I feel like a rejected tinder date in denial, "maybe their servers just have a lot going on right now"
I was going to choose sopuli.xyz but you need to give them a reason to why you want there and I never heard back from them and logging in does nothing, so I assume I was not selected. I say it would be fair if there was some message to go f myself so that I wouldn't be held in eternal limbo.
So I chose lemmy.world as it's a general purpose instance and immediate registry.
I created it myself.
Consider this a test to see if the federation works :)
It does!
Well, it looks like it is working.
Feddit.de because Deutschsprachig and I loved Reddit, but would love to see a successfully federated version of it.
When I got started on Lemmy, there were only a handful of instances and they were all general-purpose. I went and made my own so that it was exactly what I wanted.
These days, I'd probably use a list like this and choose an instance that isn't too big with a cool domain name: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
I don't think it really matters, but I picked vlemmy.net because it wasn't too big. I figured that the bigger ones were staring down the barrel of a huge influx in traffic, so I wanted to avoid them.
I didn't see any evidence of the admin being shady, but also wasn't too hasty with the defederate button.
I chose vlemmy.net for the exact same reason, too. Also it was the top instance on https://join-lemmy.org/instances the day I wanted to join another instance (I was on lemmy.ml then).
I wanted an instance specifically for Australians... so I made one 😀
Doing great work mate!
Wanted to be on a reasonably big instance, since I figure they're more likely to stick around in the long run. Lemmy.ml was closed for registration at the time (might still be, idk), and plus I have some disagreements with the admins, so I chose lemmy.world. I'm pretty happy here and don't see a reason to change personally, although the server's getting pretty overloaded recently so we'll see.
Decided to go with a smaller instance from the start, as I think we can all see what happens when one entity holds too much power within an ecosystem.
Also wanted to go with one that was not defederated from other instances (nor defederating others as well). Checked a bunch of lists, and decided to go with my current one.
.... Because I own it
I decided I felt better selfhosting it rather than being on anyone else's instance
Surprised I'm not seeing any other self-hosters in here. Having seen the de-federation drama, it's nice to know that I can federate with anyone I want, regardless of if they are federating with eachother.
Obviously it comes with the administration side of things, but I really don't mind.
We're too busy accidentally banning ourselves from our own servers to post
🤣
I definitely forgot to add a password file when I upgraded through ansible and locked myself out of the DB. Also locked myself out with the private instance + federation setting combo. Still enjoying it, though!
I was looking for a lemmy instance that would let me create communities, downvote if I wanted to downvote, and that would take care of troublemakers without being too overly restrictive.
I also wanted to ease the burden on the very busy lemmy instances that were being overwhelmed by the reddit Exodus.
It seems I have found a place. The SDF has a very long history of serving several communities in the internet and Linux world. I first ran into them decades ago, and they are still here.
When the ship of r/piracy sailed from the reddit docks, this where we landed next.
I made my first account on lemmy.ml because it had a commitment to free and open-source software with a focus on privacy.
The first I tried was Lemmy.ml. I applied and didn't hear back. So I joined Lemmy.world and registered immediately.
Picked it for the name, stayed because of the community. A lot of super nice folks here on sh.itjust.works.
I picked lemmy.world because it was recommended and had a large userbase. I know Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjustwor.ks, so if you want to interact with that community, that could be a consideration against, but since the user population across all of Lemmy is currently increasing dramatically, I think everything's a bit of a moving target regardless.
i'm on lemmy.world and i've been able to interact with beehaw? i've at the very least been able to subscribe to their magazines
You are basically shadowbanned on their instance, as they won’t see the posts that you make.
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
Tried lemmy.world as a reddit refugee but with the performance issues they're experiencing, quickly went looking for another instance with better performance and a decent amount of extra content. Lemmy.ml is blocked at work (.ml TLD is freenom so prone to abuse) and registration is closed anyway, so decided on lemm.ee.
Far better speed, a good amount of content locally, and few/no errors at the moment.
Lemmy.world got a lot more usable today. Idk if they addressed issues with resources or enough people left and went elsewhere. I definitely experienced some initial frustration I also made an account at lemm.ee but I have been sticking with my first dot-world one for now.
Exactly the same. Created an account on Lemmy.ml about a month ago but can't login today. So I created another account with the same username on lemm.ee just now and it works fine.
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.
I like the short and aesthetic of the domain name lemm.ee
Shorter domains the better I say! (usually)
•Lemmy.ml - Signed up here first, was recommended to it as a general place to sign up to
•Lemmy.blahaj.zone - Egg memes, blåhaj memes, just memes
•Lemmy.world - Handy for extra world news communities
•Lemmynsfw.com - Do I need to explain. This is under a different name, but I've kinda used that name over on the other place and I'm slowly bringing my content over (plus new stuff)
I only use one and four regularly
You know that you can follow your desired communities from other servers, all with e.g. the lemmy.ml account?
Some like to keep their dirty from their public identity
Afaik, lemmynsfw requires you to be logged in to see nswf content. In other words, you can't easily view it from other servers.
Yeah, but there's at least one community I've found that's on an instance that have defederated my main, so what I posted there the other day gained zero traction, and only found out the reason last night (re-found the community through Mastodon and couldn't see my own post). So having alt accounts for those edge cases is my thinking
Plus I post sightly different things on my nsfw account compared to this one 🤣
Was the most upvoted comment on "how to get started with Lemmy". Also, some of these other places have super strange names, I get that it doesn't matter but when you know nothing it gives bad vibes.
I've got accounts on 4 different instances just to see what things are like. Sometimes I want to see all sorts of posts, sometimes I want a feed of just LGBT-positive stuff, sometimes I just want to get off, different accounts on different instances for different things :)
Would you be down to tell me what the LGBT-positive and getting off instances that you like are? Asking for a friend 😉
Lemmy.blahaj.zone and lemmynsfw.com :) Happy browsing
LGBT instance by default is lemmy.blahaj.zone. Other instances such as Beehaw are highly acceptant and supportive as they have admins who are LGBT themselves. I'd recommend the former especially.
First I made one on ml. Then I made one on kbin because everyone said ml was a bunch of tankies and had some shady shit going on. Then none of the apps supported kbin so now I made one on world. Lol and I have no idea which one between world and ml I'm even posting from right now since I'm logged into both on liftoff
People on Discord tell me ml is at risk of de-federation from other instances because of the admins. Any truth?
I own it, hehe
Like most commenters here, because it was recommended and I'm a newbie at this.
Question though, if I create another account on say lemm.ee, is there a way for me to migrate my subscribed communities?
Sadly not, it's gonna be manual for the time being so if you're thinking about it it's probably worth doing before you have hundreds of subscriptions.
That said, I've gone through it once already on my other account and in the desktop browser it was fine, just involved opening lots of tabs and a bit of copy paste, took about ten minutes for a fairly extensive sub list. But I pity anyone trying to do it on mobile.
I do not have a link so this isn't very helpful but yesterday I saw someone posted that they had made something to do exactly this. I wish I could remember what community I saw it in. You may have to do some digging. Knew I should've saved it...
I'd heard you shouldn't pick one of the largest, I explicitly didn't want a server run by Nazis, Paleolibertarians, or Marxist-Leninists, and I didn't mind the rules here.
A subreddit I was in linked their lemmy community and it was on dbzer0 so I created a account on there and called it a day.
yeah i clicked the link a sub im in linked to and it was lemmy.world and i didnt bother looking too much into it
I found beehaw first, so I started there but then discovered that the admins manage the community creation there. So I made a new account on lemmy.world to mod that, and most browsed with my beehaw account. But then beehaw needed to de-federate from lemmy.world, so I made a vLemmy and lemmy.one accounts so I could interact with both beehaw and lemmy.world.
tl;dr As someone else mentioned, finding a smaller, low-profile instance to have your home account but interacting with other instances seems to be the best approach
Yeah it does kinda matter, which is problematic for onboarding new users. Personally:
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.
Set up the server myself. For me, that’s part of the fediverse experience.
My first account was on lemmy.one but then I stood up my own instance to learn more about Lemmy.
I chose Aussie.zone cause I'm out of touch with my own country so seeing the news here is nice and cause I thought it would be easier to join a country instance.
Also optional email and I know I could make a temp email but I can't be bothered.
So I joined lemmy.world because I use to be a user of reddit is fun, rip, and in their going away message they mentioned .world. So I joined that instance not realizing how the fediverse works.
Overall what I've seen is the instance you join determines your "front page" since by default it will be set to show local communities. Other than that subscribe to any community from any instance then set your front page to show "subscribed" or "all" and you get your basic Reddit experience
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.
It has the word world in the name, sounds bigger.
Yeah sounds like a main character so chose it.
Country, I live in The Netherlands so I searched for a Dutch hosted instance with Dutch owner.
Biggest German server and good community.
I run my own private instance so I am in control over my own data.
Tbh, I don’t think it matters what server you choose. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and Beehaw seem to be the big ones so picking a server that federates with those would be ideal.
I joined the one hosted by my country's community. The community is really great.
I picked pawb because furries know tech really well, so I can trust the server to be fairly reliable.
I chose vlemmy.net cause it seemed neutral, general, and was one of the recommended ones. So far so good.
I was planning to sign up at BeeHaw because it seems pretty active and with high quality discussions. When I heard that it had defederated from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world I decided not to sign up to any of those three as I would rather have access to all of them (though I can understand why BeeHaw defederated). So I just went with VLemmy.net as it was one of the recommended ones (on join-lemmy.org and the Awesome-Lemmy-Instances GitHub) and seems to be very broadly federated.
I don't think it matters too much, though I think if you were signed up on the same instances as all your favourite communities it would be a bit more convenient.
What does it mean they were defederated? How does that impact lemmy.World etc
This means beehaw will not see any content from the servers they defederated from, effectively preventing trolls and toxic users from harassing people in beehaw.
Well, I started my instance so it only makes sense that its also my home!
As for why I started an instance, I've always liked self-hosting stuff as its been one of the best ways I learn how stuff on the internet works, even more than I have learnt from doing some programming in my spare time. So it was an obvious move for me since I wanted to know more about how ActivityPub worked.
Originally I wasn't really planning on having open registration on my instance (otherwise I would've picked a better domain name, a bit late for that now) however as I saw Lemmy pick up pace, and the larger servers were starting to have issues, I figured that the best way I could give back was at least offer to share the load.
Trans, pan, 196, and Blahaj is friend.
https://media.tenor.com/e7p3zXTC2owAAAAd/blahaj-ikea.gif
It doesn't really matter actually, but I would prefer to stay on the one with more members as it will probably last longer than other instances
The Admin of my instance (discuss.tchncs.de) is tolerant but understands the tolerance paradox. (Defderated with exploding heads but not every left instance - doesn't fall for false balance.
Also he was fast with approving new accounts.
Yeah got approved today 20 mins after verifying my email. It was a pleasant surprise
Idk, because why not Estonia.
I have two. I have this one (lemmy.ml) as my broad-access instance. My other is lemmygrad, but as that is a bit more widely blocked I keep this one still. That one is used for most of my politics, and this one is my more general interest. It's kind of nice to have different communities died to different user registrations.
As to why those two in particular, I am a Marxist-Leninist so...yeah.
I'm with the boys on lemm.ee !
Es ist Deutschland hier!
I read some comments that lemmy.ca was well run to the extent that it was being recommended even by non-Canadians. Being Canadian myself, that was good enough for me.
It's a friendly instance and is well-run. The admin manually approved registrations which kept them safe from the great bot invasion and is now upgrading the server and bringing on more admins.
I'm into general instances and also a long time user of Fediverse, so I know 10-200 user instances work best. That's why I picked the first one with not too many and not too little users (the join-lemmy page only showed 50 new users when I registered, damn)
Literally just picked the biggest one to maximise the content I see
Rn it matters a bit, wont in a few weeks tho i think
Why won't it? Do you think updates will make the fragmentation of content better in a few weeks?
I'm learning german so while i was looking for some german speaking communities. They're surprisingly big and keep growing.
Gekoloniseerd
German = swamp German. Source? Letterlijk God
I tried to find a server that isn't blocking anyone, and hasn't been defederated by any of the big servers.
I want to avoid an echo-chamber and have access to everything on the fediverse, including stuff I find distateful. If anything really bothers me I will block the community/instance myself, I don't want others making that choice for me.
Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of folks out there just searching for an excuse to clutch their pearls, rile up a mob, and defederate anything and everything that offends them.
I don't want to circlejerk in a safe space echo chamber, I want to see both the yin and the yang of humanity. I want that wild west feeling of the internet of old
I shall inform you of a secret. There are some big servers around that don't defederate anything and aren't defederated by anyone. :) that's all I'm saying, it's up to you to find the treasure.
Is there any way to see who is federated/defederated, and from whom?
I made a tool just for that: https://federation-checker.vercel.app/
This uses two things: https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=lemm.ee and https://lemm.ee/instances (do replace "lemm.ee" with whichever instance you want to check)
My tool is bugged, and lemm.ee does defederate instances, so be aware of that and maybe use what my tool uses instead of my tool if you want reliable output :)
Bouncing between several since lemmy.world is being hammered right now, I'm sure once the dust settles things will calm down. Right now I'm on infosec.pub because it was recommended to me as a smaller server. It really doesn't matter so long as whatever you're on communicates with everyone else.
It's kind of a pain when different accounts have different subscriptions. Do you know a good way to sync them up? (Either a one time import or continuously)
The easiest thing to do is open one account's subscriptions in one browser window, the other account's subscriptions in the other, then work through them. It doesn't take too long but I wouldn't want to do it very often.
As this place grows, I imagine more people will create useful tools for doing stuff like that. The trick is finding out about it when it appears.
I wish!
Made one on lemmy.world but it's crumbling under the pressure as we speak. Tried a local one, but it has like 5 users. Don't trust it to live long enough. So started using the star trek one, because star trek. Not as if you'd need any other reason
I am hosting it lol
Because I'm a furry. obligatory OwO
The list of blocked instances made me switch from feddit.de to the current instance I'm using.
A friend owns it and it has a funny domain. Bonus of it being smaller is that it didn't have any performance issues yesterday/today.
Not seeing anyone mentioning lemmy.one and I'm starting to think I made a bad choice.
I'm here! I read some disappointing stuff about the creator of it, but I'm not on Lemmy for the personality-worship. If it works, that's all I need.
I'm hoping it eventually allows downvoting and community creation, but I understand leaving that out at least while it deals with the waves of new users.
Fellow .one resident here. Love it.
It doesn't but I thought it did
Google search. I had no clue about multiple instances. Search lemmy on Google and first link was for lemmy.ml domain so that's how I am here.
I tried a few, at one point a few weeks ago I thought I would stick with lemmy.world because (then) it wasn't the most popular instance and seemed to have good resources... but then it became the most popular instance and got defederated by beehaw (and I was subscribed to a few beehaw communities). So I signed up to feddit.uk just because I'm from the UK and it seemed solid. I think if you have no strong niche interest then picking one made for your region/country is a pretty good bet.
Was initially on lemmy.zip because it seemed really chill and that was such a cool instance name. I had no problems with it whatsoever but I realised it didn't block out certain instances that I disliked (aka lemmygrad). Now I'm on lemmy.fmhy.ml and I'm loving it so far since it had everything I needed:
I saw people complaining that the admins were communists and I was like dope, I love those guys.
Plus healthy number of users (maybe too many actually) and local communities
Don't worry about the too many users, commies are excellent reducing excess population
I joined latte.isnot.coffee because its description said it was specifically for Reddit refugees. I'm a little worried it may be run by pro-CCP tankies, though.
I joined lemmy.ca because I like to keep a diet of local news and a place to avoid American influence. I like using my local feed for well the local stuff and then my subscriptions for all the niche interests that the Canadian community couldn't sustain alone.
it was canadian
I signed up with beehaw first, but realized that they were defederated from lemmygrad, which I wanted access to. As I became more acquainted with lemmy and started looking into the "flavors" of the different instances, I joined lemmy.ml because they are unapologetic communists and won't defederate with lemmygrad.
As an aside, it's fucking insane to me that lemmygrad is so controversial yet there's crickets about exploding-heads and people are happy to be on instances that don't block them. Cool
Everywhere I've seen has been defederating from exploding-heads.
do things from your home instance, so once you find a community on another instance you want on your home instance, go to your home instance and search ![email protected] eg ![email protected] and itl will pull in a few posts to start off, if you subscribe to that remote community hen your home instance will keep on getting posts.
Its status on federation with problematic instances.
I picked Rammy for the name and the sidebar:
I’m in Kansas City so I joined https://midwest.social 😄
I have has a journey through a few instances.
I first applied to Lemmy.ml because I was interested in open source. I also applied at Lemmy.one and Beehaw because they were recommended on join-lemmy.
I got accepted at Beehaw. Then they defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.it. Stayed on Beehaw for a while but found a few communities on world that I couldn’t join, so decided to sign up to world.
World was having performance issues and I realised I could no longer interact with the Beehaw communities and people I had started talking with.
Then found lemm.ee I like the name, it hadn’t been defederated by any other instances, had good up time, was on the latest Lemmy code, and the admin seemed to know what they were doing, so joined that one. I don’t see myself moving again any time soon.
Feddit.uk - I figure regionality has benefit in keeping loads more spread, plus it hosts some good communities and a cute name.
On the day I signed up, 18.0 was rolling out and lemmy.one was the only one that worked on Jerboa. I wanted to try out the different apps and see what worked well so that was where I started. I also have an account on lemmy.world but I don't think it's necessary unless there's a problem with lemmy.one. might still use another server if I can create my own community there.
Lemmy.world was the only server where I could make an account during the busier days of reddit immigration.
One of the few only lgbt friendly servers
Are many other servers proactively anti-lgbt?
Proactively... I don't know, but i know of one that acts like a friendly instance, but allows bigoted stuff to stay up.
Heard lemmy.ml and lemmy.world were being overwhelmed.
Others did not exist back than.
How to you feel about "us youngsters" barging in here and bringing server performance to its knees? (sorry!)
We're old. 👴
There was good ol’ Lemmygrad ^^
The one I use doesn't block other instances, although I probably will block the same instances and people that big instances already block, I want to be the one to make that choice and shape the content I see.
I owned a funny domain
Ideology!
Because of nationality
lemmy.world because it was top recommended. In the future I might change to either host my own or use my wife's ex-husband's instance.
Is that a roundabout way of saying you're getting a divorce? Does she know?
U 2 are buddies now? 🤪🤔
I don't remember the instance I am currently on, but I do remember that the main Lemmy instance I found was probably too full with people performing a mass exodus to it.
I saw a local instance for new Zealanders and joined.
as a Greylag goose i flock to feddit.uk
Tried to join but looks like they don't accept disposable emails unfortunately.
The TLD.
Because RIF recommended it
Lemmy user for a couple of days here. I jumped on lemmy.world because it was big and the name suggested it was universal and open, it had open registration and allows nsfw content.
I suffered through the technical issues many of us experienced, but everything seems much better and smoother now (maybe because they were able to fix the issues, or maybe because enough people left because of them, I can't say!)
Does it matter what you use? Yes and no, I guess. Apparently the last few days performance issues were mostly local to dot-world. I did make another profile on lemm.ee and I noticed the different instances seem to show different feeds with some different content, but also many of the same posts from the same communities as well. I'm still trying to figure out how they decide what they show in their feeds. Something to do with federation, I guess, but I'm not pretending to understand the meaning of that concept yet. Given that instances can choose to federated or defederate, it seems like it must matter to some extent what instance you are on even though content can be shared between instances.
Basically, you saw different posts on each instance's local feed because they dont always federate with the exact same servers, one may be blocked on one instance or not yet discovered
it does matter what instance you're on when your instance starts getting defederated by others - so far i know a lot of servers defederated lemmygrad and explodingheads for political extremism, and beehaw blocked shitjustworks and lemmy.world because of bots
I signed up with lemmy.ml originally, but then it was a little hugged to death. I couldn't update my community, couldn't post pictures or anything and I kept getting errors. I tried Beehaw but you can't make your own community and that was a no go for me. Then they defederated.
I went through the list that was only like 10 servers or something at the time, found slrpnk.net which had the vibes of the subreddit I run and found a new home for NoLawns. The guy who runs it seems pretty cool when I had to reach out to him so I've made it my home.
I did also just make a kbin the other day to see what that's all about too but with no app (yet there's a few in the works), I've stuck here.
Did you have to pick a new username when signing up again?
No, I used the same user on both instances. I used a different one for kbin though
It's the first one I found and many others were filled with germans and I said "Nein"
It was nearby geographically and the guy running it seemed to know what he was doing from a technical aspect.
The name of the instance made me laugh.
I signed up at Redditthat.com as it was listed as a recommend instance. I didn't want to overcomplicate the choice. If this instance doesn't fit my needs, I can still create another account somewhere else.
Mod of a subreddit I was following created an instance, its was the easiest choice
Because it's a furry instance
I want to be in control over my own data. So I spun up my own instance
I was on dataterm.digital, I loved that server, but they went down one day and just never came back up. Sometimes I can still hear it SYN ACK
For some reason I couldn't join lemmy.world and few other popular instances, be it because of technical issues, load, idk. I joined sh.itjust.works because I wanted to check fediverse before I commit to host my own instance, which I probably will at some point.
I saw a youtube video that said lemmy.ml was full so you can't join. I just picked a random one that wasn't ml so I chose lemmy.world
Even lemmy.word, at least for me, was difficult to join. I have a hard time to log into the account I have created there. I think we must understand this is not redit, the platform is fundamentally different how you approach it. The fuller the server gets, the more difficult it gets to get into your account.
I wonder if it'd be possible to setup a registration server of some sort instead of only picking instances manually? Ideally it'd know if one particular server was near capacity and could direct new user registrations to another.
I have no idea how this sort of platform functions, just spitballing.
I don't think it is necessary, as @navordar mentioned, just pick a smaller server, maybe have two or three accounts on different servers for now might work, unless you are willing to host an instance that will help grow the federated network.
Hosting your instance, might require some commitment, good admin skills and transparency. I am inspired how the arch Linux community handles their admin for projects, I believe whoever hosts a instance that follow the same philosophy, that instance might stay active for a very long time.
I want something spread out from a maint instance, and is relevant to me, so I went with Midwest.social. I also knew about their mastodon track record, which helps me feel secure knowing it's a good instance
The domain name. And the community seemed friendly enough. Now with the Reddit exodus, I'm glad I migrated to a smaller instance.
Lemmy.ca felt like a natural home as an IRL Canadian resident. I like the variety of content and the moderation seems good so far.
It does seem like some servers have specific niches, so if you're really interested in a specific servers niche using that instance would prevent you from having to sync those communities with your instance.
I'm new, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I think you’re right! It can be nice to have an active local feed with topics you’re interested in, so that’s a good reason to pick a topical instance (eg mander.xyz or slrpnk.net).
Nobody asked my opinion but my interpretation of how this whole fediverse "should" work is that while there can be empirical instances, federation shines with smaller, easy to manage instances thst connect to each other.
I added an account to a few geared towards specific community types. Then I can easily switch accounts and view local.
I'm considering standing up an instance for this type of thing myself.
Saw Lemmy.World and Kbin mentioned on reddit. I alternate between the two but increasingly am on Lemmy.World more.
I just picked lemmy.world because it’s big. Not a very good justification, but it’s the one I’ve got
It was that or Beehaw and Beehaw happened to be down at the time.
Lemmy.ml was requesting people register on other instances, and lemmy.one stepped up to fill the void.
But when people ask me what instance to sign up for, I tell them lemmy.world. it doesn't really matter, but being based in a bigger instance reduces the friction of finding communities.
I joined lemmy.ml a while ago because following cool opensource projects is my jam.
I live in Finland, Sopuli is a Finnish instance with a decent sized community.
I initially had no idea how to select an instance or what that would impact, so I joined a random one but didn't take long to realize that the instance doesn't have much activity and most of what it does have is about truckers. Nothing against truckers but that isn't super applicable to me. After messing around a little I also realized that it's possible the server will just disappear, which could happen to any of them but I thought a larger instance might have more staying power (or maybe not I really have no idea).
Because Blahaj is life.
Also because the mods and community are amazing and I'm already on their calckey server :)
I'm on lemmy.ml because my application was ignored (or not accepted, I don't know) by the smaller instances I've applied to.
The subreddit migrated here during the blackout so I just joined that same instance.
Chose an instance without mandatory email account and which seemed serious
I use lemmy.ml because i found it has a large user-base. I also like programming.dev and ideally i would like to see all the posts from the one and the other instance into one :)
I run it
Eventually i'll open it up to registrations when I feel its ready
I joined a bunch. I paid for the whole fediverse (not really) and I'm going to use the whole fediverse.
Blahaj zone is explicitly and deliberately queer friendly, and a bit more lenient than beehaw
I picked Lemmy.world because I wanted a fairly large one that will likely maintain support.
I just picked several because I was able to.
I followed advice that said to avoid big instances due to possible instability, but also avoid tiny instances because you don't want them to shut down. So I was looking for something decent size, but not huge. I also wanted to minimize defederation so I could make my own decisions on blocking. I narrowed it down to three. Since I'm 13 deep down, I landed on sh.itjust.works.
it was the only one when i joined
Ideology 🙂.
It's a local one near my country :)
Vlemmy sounded not sketchy.
Initially made an account with the instance opened after my country's subreddit made the shift, but on Jerboa trying to look at other instance content was really rough.
So I joined here since I enjoy the content, and raise the black flag every so often.
Is there really a difference between the different servers? I just browse all (It's lemm.ee btw)
Well there are different rules on different servers, for a start. Which ones they're federated with can potentially make a big difference.
And then of course if you're just relying on All, you'll miss out on stuff that a bigger server might see because nobody from yours has subbed to it yet. But that's sorting itself out over time, and you can always speed up the process by making sure to regularly do a trawl for new interesting communities to pull in with a tool like lemmyverse.net/communities. Absolutely not a reason to sign up on a big server, just a reason to be more proactive if you're on a smaller one.
Wait... ugh, someone needs to make a cute little graphics animation to explain this shit.
I'm on lemmy.ml. When I choose to see "all," is that just listing communities that other users on lemmy.ml subscribed to?? I thought it listed content from all other servers connected/federated with lemmy.ml??
It's posts from all the communities lemmy.ml knows about, as opposed to all of the communities everywhere in existence. Given enough people and time the two lists end up being basically the same but obviously during a period of rapid growth like right now, new communities are popping up every second so it's gonna take a little while until all the major instances know about them.
Tools like lemmyverse.net let you keyword search communities based on your interests so you can find new things to sub to. If you're the first to do so from lemmy.ml, congrats, your server now knows about that community and everyone else on there will start seeing posts from it in All.
I'm from the Midwest. Like to be on a server with similar people
I knew picking from the popular sources will provide a slow experience, so I went to a GitHub repository and picked the shortest domain from the recommended section.
Others did not exist back than.
I chose mine because it disallows NSFW on its own communities and takes a hard stance against defederation while not being defederated. I want to have more control over my feed and not be isolated.
It federates with the servers that have some stuff I want access to on them, and it also has rules against being a huge douche. And it's supported by Jerboa.
That's pretty much it. Mix of convenience and what passes for my moral scruples.
I wanted to use lemmy.ml but i couldn't so i ended up using lemmy.world
Went with Lemmy.world during the blackout because it seemed to have the most activity.
I had the means and am a systems engineer by trade, so I set up my own instance. I decided to open it up to help the fediverse.
Mostly random tbh
Initially I sign up for beehaw because it was the first one recommended on the sign up page. They defederated from some instances, so I made another account with lemmyworld. They had issues that made them incompatible with the app I was using (mobile user only), so I now have an account with lemme. Three accounts, I swap around based on which one is working best on that particular day.
It actually matter. Initially I choose .world, they run by nice and competent people but the surge of users is simply too much. It makes experience there is subpar with slow response due to high load and high latency due to distance (.world hosted in europe, I live in SEA). I then migrated lemmy.my.id, and the experience is improved a lot as the server is nearer and the users still few.
I’m a pirate 🏴☠️ and like the community itself, friendly and helpful.
like most of the others here, I went because of the $5 signup bonus.
lemmy.ml was the only general purpose instance when I opened my account. There were only two instances back then - lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml
I frequently see Stux on mastodon, and I think they're a good person so I decided to choose one of their instances when choosing a Lemmy server.
Tried the bee but did not get any notification I was accepted. Fortunately saw programming.dev pop on my feed and they accepted my request.
Good thing as well that I found all of my favorite programming languages on the server.
I have my own self-hosted server at home, and YunoHost had a package available for Lemmy, but not yet for Kbin.
I'm hosting my own. I had a free server with 9GB RAM and 99GB disk space, and it was only running my Mastodon server until now. I like the freedom to do what I want with the server :)
I chose aussie.zone cause I'm from Australia and it's nice to hang out with other Aussies
I tried to join programming.dev but they were having a tech problem. I wanted to join them because I learned about lemmy through the programee space. I hopped to lemmy.world and then immediately realized that was a bad idea for future stability. It was leggy and the flood hadn't even begun. Then I learned about sh.itjust.works and I picked it for stability reasons and having a decent amount of users. I stayed because I'm digging it for now and it was totally stable through the flood.
I was linked here by RIF and only found out that other instances existed after signing up.
Ideology 🙂.
lemmy.ml because when I joined I had no idea of how the fediverse worked. I'd change it to a smaller one but it really doesn't matter much I don't think.
The language. There is few server that are solely or mostly in Portuguese.
I went with ReddThat as the past tense seemed apt. Also it's a small enough instance not to feel overwhelming, while being large enough to provide content.
IDK
Was looking for a smaller instance which doesn't block many instances so I don't risk having an instance I want to see blocked. By the way I also use Arch
I went for what I believe to be the bigger one, because it might get a higher quality of support from third parties, and still be here after a year.