Does it actually matter?
It doesn’t but I thought it did
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’m with the boys on lemm.ee !
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
Nerf
I created it myself.
Consider this a test to see if the federation works :)
It does!
I didn’t know what I was doing so I chose at random.
Ditto. Can’t downvote on mine, apparently, but honestly that’s probably better for my mental health right now. It’s teaching me to just move on from stuff I don’t like, instead of pretending the little burst of negativity encompassed in my downvote actually accomplishes anything meaningful for me.
I have a few now just to test it out. I want to use feddit.nl as my standard server, but I just haven’t fully figured out how this all works.
Like for example I’m on lemmy.world and subscribe to something, that channel/sub doesn’t seem to appear on feddit.nl. there can be a channel with the same name but it isn’t the one I subscribed to.
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 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.
Same
There is several of factors you should consider:
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Does it have a healthy amount of users: between 1k-10k users are probably the sweet spot right now. You don’t want too many users because it will cause performance problems. And instances with too few users has too many unknowns.
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read the rules see if you agree: servers can have wildy different rules ranging from no NSFW to no downvotes. If they don’t have any rules that is a red flag too. You want an active moderation so the instance doesn’t get run over by bots.
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Does it look low effort: check the banner, how the announcement formatted.
That is probably all the basics
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I’m a dirty hippy and slrpnk.net seemed like a server for other dirty hippies
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.
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.