How do you choose an instance and does that have a significant effect on your Lemmy experience?

loobkoob, 10 months ago

I personally opted for kbin.social - I like the UI more, I like the community in the kbin-specific threads, and I like that I have the option to follow Mastodon users and interact with the whole micro-blogging side of the fediverse as well as using the "threadiverse" (Lemmy, etc). I think the occasional issues are bound to happen regardless of your instance, purely because it's such a new and growing platform. kbin's largely been rather stable, though.

The biggest downside for a lot of people is that kbin isn't supported by most of the mobile apps yet. Personally, I don't mind this - there's a PWA (progressive web app - essentially just a fancy bookmark to the mobile site that keeps it in its own unique browser instance with the tabs, menus, etc, hidden so it looks like an app) that works really nicely. The mobile site is really nice to use in general, so I've no issues just using this until a killer app comes along.

macallik, 10 months ago

Similar thought process for me. The only downside I've experienced thus far is that once or twice a week, I'll get error messages when I try to interact w/ content (upvote/boost/etc).

I think I'll likely create another account when Threads joins the federation but kbin.social chooses to defederate 🤔

bradorsomething, 10 months ago

I came here with the dndmemes crowd to ttrpg.network and I’m having a great time. Find your people, and you can easily subscribe across to what you want to see.

MargotRobbie, 10 months ago

I like the instance policy here on world mostly, it’s open to all, and that the admins are reasonable with the rules and are quick to respond to issues.

Epicurus0319, 10 months ago

I’ve got an alt on sopuli.xyz

lemming007, 10 months ago

I go to the ones that everyone else defederates. Means they have something important to say. I’m against all censorship.

sparky678348, 10 months ago

Why is this garbage comment at the top, can I change my default comment sorting?

ThrowawayPermanente, 10 months ago

It depends on who is defederating from you. Extremists? You’re probably doing something right. Normal people? Maybe not so much.

lemming007, 10 months ago

Depends on your definition of “extremists” and “normal people”

rm_dash_r_star, 10 months ago

Go instance shopping. Yeah you’re creating accounts on instances you may not use, but creating an account for a test drive is acceptable I think. I tried five instances before I found one I liked. My runner up I use as a backup in case my primary goes down for some reason.

First I narrowed down candidates to those that are regionally close to me. You can sort instance location by going to the-federation.info/platform/73. Further down the page you’ll see a listing of all nodes (instances). You click on the location header to sort them by country.

Then you want to look at user numbers. Too big and the instance could have overload issues. Too small and the instance may not be well established and reliable. So medium on the user counts.

Then I did a “ping” on ones that looked good to see how they do on network response.

Once I found good candidates, I created an account on each and gave it a test drive. You can see who won for me.

GodOfThunder, 10 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Depending on which instances are blocked you will see different content in ones or others. Which is why I choose instance based on the minimum number of blocked users based on the results of this script.

Attempted_Render, 10 months ago

I basically did the same thing. Wrote a script to get a list of instances and how many instances they were federated with, blocked, and blocked by. Chose my instance based on those numbers after looking at a few of the top candidates.

hawkwind, 10 months ago

You mean blocked instances right? AFAIK an instances “blocked users” is not published in aggregate. You’d have to comb through the modlog.

GodOfThunder, 10 months ago

I don’t know there is a lemmy-stats-crawler utility that does it automatically and produces a json file. So all I do is parse that json file to get the numbers.

hawkwind, 10 months ago

Ahh. I see. I took a look at the script. “Blocked Users,” is not reported by an instance, but rather It’s calculated by this script by looking at “Blocked Instances,” which is reported. How many active users each blocked instance has and then summing this together, the script shows “BU.” I was thinking it was an explicit list of users the instance blocked based on ban/block lists.

It’s a derivative, but still useful metric, I guess. BU could be high, but BI could be low and vice-versa.

ladybug, 10 months ago

I started on Lemmy.world, but found mander.xyz as a backup. Mander.xyz is smaller and has interesting science and nature content on Local without lots of negativity. It also federates with a lot of subs (including both beehaw and Lemmy.world) so I can still see everything in All.

small44, 10 months ago

There are still a lot of syncing problems in Lemmy some outside posts show late or never show in other instances.I’m not worried about Lemmy.world despite all the attacks and issues they got. I think small instances are more chance to die than lemmy.world. If an instance die all the communities on it dies that’s not something I want to see especially if you are a mod on an community

hawkwind, 10 months ago

More “portable” and secure identities would have been a good feature. The client could have handled most of the crypto required for signing and validating content. As it stands now, the instance Admin has complete control over your identity. Portable communities would follow that easily.

Most of the syncing issues are actually between the large instances or instances that having performance issues.

Sabakodgo, 10 months ago

Because it’s FMHY 🏴‍☠️

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack

You’ve seen for yourself that it does have a significant effect. You may not want the largest instance because that paints a big target on you. You also need to pick an instance with admins you can trust, or at least reconcile yourself to jumping ship to another instance if they do the wrong thing.

I started on lemmy.ml about a year before the reddit exodus. It was fine, and I didn’t use it much because there wasn’t much activity. I started using Lemmy more heavily when everyone came over… but at the same time, performance at lemmy.ml became horrible. They also disabled community creation because “(they) have enough communities.” What does that even mean? I still haven’t created any communities, but I would like to be able to if I choose to.

I ended up jumping ship to another instance I’m happy with so far… but I almost went to vlemmy first, which no longer exists. That would have had an affect on my experience.

If I were evaluating an instance today, I would start by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see what version they’re on. Is it the latest? That means the admins are engaged at least enough to keep the software updated. If not, you should probably move on. Are they on a pre-release version? If so, are you comfortable with a little instability to have bleeding edge features and fixes? Then, I would just poke around a little to see how performance is on the instance before creating an account. Is it acceptable? Read the server sidebar. Are you OK with the rules? Last, I would find the support or “meta” community for the instance. See what kinds of discussions are happening there. Are the mods and admins active and are they philosophically aligned with you? Are problems being fixed? What are the big announcements? Does the way the server is being managed make sense to you?

Ghyste, 10 months ago

I like the name.

DashboTreeFrog, 10 months ago

They did come up with a good one over at sh.itjust.works

TheInsane42, 10 months ago

I started on lemmy.ml, as I code a lot. I got a lemmy.world account when I found a lot of communities there I wanted to join and a lemmy.studio account for music communities. That was a few min before I learned how to subscribe cross-instance. (I couldn’t find the communities) I could clean up teh accounts, but nah, couldn’t think of a reason why.

Now lemmy.world is my main instance with lemmy.ml as 1st backup and lemmy.studio as special interest. (and I found a Dutch instance)

dQw4w9WgXcQ, 10 months ago

I originally created a user on vlemmy.net. Then at some point that instance disappeared, causing me to lose the user, subscriptions and settings. So I created a user on lemmy.world. For whatever reason, it became very buggy - I don’t know if it’s the app (I’m using Jerboa) or the instance, but I got constantly logged out and loading posts didn’t work properly. Third time’s a charm (so far) as I created this user on lemm.ee.

The confidence of stability of different instances seems to be a huge detractor for me. I’m hoping to see lemm.ee run with decent stability going forward.

sparky678348, 10 months ago

I’ve been on Lemm.ee since the start with no problems. Can you sandwich together those accounts across different instances somehow?

kite, 10 months ago

I’ve jumped around a lot after paying attention to other folks’ instances and looking into ones that sound interesting in some way. As I’ve gotten more familiar with the fediverse concept and what’s out there, I’ve hopped instances. I’m not a heavy user, so it takes a little time, but I’m definitely a little bit more satisfied after every jump. I actually just moved to kbin.social tonight, but haven’t changed my login on this app yet. Swapped Mastodon servers, too, ended up at vmst.io. First one I actually found multiple things I was interested in following.