I wanted to experience massive slowdowns and losses of basic functionality every time spez pissed off reddit again.
I’ve been happy with mastodon.world and Lemmy.world has the same admin(s).
I think there are two main schools of thought when choosing an instance:
It’s the typical small fish in a big sea or a big fish in a small sea dichotomy
I read that it's not a good idea to register to the biggest instances so that the user base is spread out. So, I found a nice instance about science and here I am on mander.xyz 🙃
I'm still trying to figure it out. I joined feddit.uk just because I'm in the UK. Then I realised most of the communities were about politics and football teams. I read about Beehaw and like the sound of that so joined up there. Then realised that they had defederated from lemmy.world (which I understand and am not complaining about). So I created an account on lemmy.world as well.
I guess the thing to figure out is to find the communities you are interested in, subscribe to them and make sure your instance is federated with whatever instance those communities are part of. Then it doesn't really matter which one you join? If you just want to scroll mindlessly through posts from all of Lemmy, I guess you can just find an instance that is federated with everything and set your filter to 'All' and go nuts.
Does it really matter beyond performance? I was still learning how things work and picked up the one with most subscribers 🙈
In order of priority:-
I joined Sopuli 9 months ago, and they do a really good job with all of my categories.
I also created accounts on the main .ml and shit just works instance but one or the other factors failed there, where it didn't here, so I'm waiting for Lemmy to allow account migration to fully get rid of those.
Basically this, I tried some servers until I found one that let me register without problems.
I considered lemmy.ml at first, but it had a message asking people to sign up on a different instance because they were overloaded. I chose lemmy.world because the admins had experience running a decently sized Mastodon server.
The first community I missed on reddit after they stayed dark was ich_iel, and they moved to feddit.de.
To be honest, I kinda regret that choice, and I usually browse kbin.social. Smaller instances fail to provide the varied experience that made reddit great for me.
I did also start out on feddit.de but soon switched over to Lemmy.world due to too many limits when it comes to federation (e.g. general ban on nsfw instances).
Since I can still participate in all the communities on feddit.de this does work great for me
I did also start out on feddit.de but soon switched over to Lemmy.world due to too many limits when it comes to federation (e.g. general ban on nsfw instances).
Since I can still participate in all the communities on feddit.de this does work great for me
You can participate, but it’s such a hassle :-/
This is frankly unacceptably complicated for a regular, casual user to just cast a vote on a post.
Honestly once you are subscribed to an instance I don't think it is a hassle.
If you find the post in the feed of your home instance (for example on All) you will directly post via you home instance. If you are subscribed you can access any foreign community via the communities tab of your home instance.
So at least in my experience with Lemmy I never had the issues you described.
Started off on kbin a few weeks ago but as good as it is, it's in its infancy & currently without an api so as im impatient I checked out Lemmy. Chose an instance without content restrictions, blocking the least number of other instances & being blocked itself by the least number of other instances. No idea if that was the best choice but that's how the dice landed.
Started off on kbin a few weeks ago but as good as it is, it's in its infancy & currently without an api so as im impatient I checked out Lemmy. Chose an instance without content restrictions, blocking the least number of other instances & being blocked itself by the least number of other instances. No idea if that was the best choice but that's how the dice landed.
Server's admin IT skills and general attitude, defederation status (the less defederations the better), server's location and tech characteristics.
I had first found lemmy.ml mentioned on Reddit, so I checked it out and found they were overloaded and it was having issues staying up and being responsive. I saw someone mention lemmy.world, so I went and signed up there.
Beehaw said adios to a lot of the communities I subbed to so I just came to where they were anyway.
I had zero clue what instance to start with, and of course within minutes every instance started accusing every other instance of everything which definitely did nothing to help.
Beehaw seemed as good as any and mostly cause it just had a different name than Lemmy lol. After a couple days someone linked kbin.social and I made an account there and found I liked the UI more, plus it has the odd feature or three lemmy doesn't have (or didn't, I don't know how that corner of the fediverse has been developing). Day or two later I stopped using Beehaw and just kbin.
I guess I'll also add in Mastodon for shits & grins: Mstdn.ca. Cause I'm Canadian...that one was simpler lol
I considered lemmy.ml at first, but it had a message asking people to sign up on a different instance because they were overloaded. I chose lemmy.world because the admins had experience running a decently sized Mastodon server.
I didn't pick Lemmygrad.ml because of tankies. I didn't pick Lemmy.ml because it was the biggest server in April last year, and I wanted to avoid the biggest servers (same thing with other fediverse pages). Other servers had dozens of users and almost no content. The server I'm on had like 500 users and a moderate amount of content. And it was located in Finland, Europe (I'm from Spain).
Someone invited me to kbin.social, and did the work of creating a community for us. Like 99.99% of the Redditors in my community did not follow, but I did, and more will come as Reddit gets worse and the Fediverse gets better.
Don't overlook the effect of providing an actual helping hand to someone to lessen the transition pains, for people who are legit interested and would feel more welcomed that way than having to face that barrier as their very first task.