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Fediverse @lemmy.ml
Blaze (he/him) @sopuli.xyz

What are your criteria for choosing an instance other than Lemmy.world?

Hello everyone,

Based on the recent instability of Lemmy.world, a lot of people have been wondering whether they should move to another instance.

I used to look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and recommend people to pick a generalist instance with as much users as possible (using the 1m column), usually

Of course, there are also the regional options

And of course, the thematic instances

I used to recommend the most populated instances, as we know that All depends on users subscribed from the instance.

However, now with the introduction of the Lemmy Community Seeder (https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs), which

tells your instance to pull the top communities and the communities with the top posts from your favorite instances

do you think this should still apply? I have seen promising instances (high uptime, already on 18.4 that was released today)

Would you recommend users to join those as well, assuming that the admins use the LCS to populate the All feed? Most of us remember the Vlemmy.net disappearance, and it's difficult to tell users to join small instances based on good faith, but at the same time, every instance needs to start somewhere, and they should be given a chance.

What do you think?

141 comments

  • I went with Feddit.uk as I am in the UK and it also helps give a more local spin to things because, increasingly, the English-language web seems to default to an American take on things and so going local helps counter that.

    Plus uptime is good and the admin has said they will wield the defederation hammer sparingly.

  • I started with lemmy.ml because I didn't know what other server to use.

    Then I found out that SDF, which I've used since 2000 or so, was hosting its own Lemmy instance. Since I've already been in that community for decades, I migrated my lemmy there.

    Beehaw is really nice as well, that is where my spouse, who has zero Fediverse time, joined.

    • SDF is indeed a nice community.

      The issue with Beehaw is their defederation from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, which prevents accessing some communities (even though I'm not a 100% if it's bidirectional or only one way)

  • I like having an instance with local communities that match some of my interests. I also tried to find one a little more niche, but not so small as to be run out of someone's closet. And of course, always donate to your home instance. Bandwidth doesn't grow on trees!

    On the privacy side, it was also important to me to have an instance that didn't want my email address.

    • always donate to your home instance

      Couldn't agree more. I treat this as a rule across the fediverse. Hell I spend more time on various fedi platforms than I do playing video games, so I may as well put my money where my mouth is

  • A probably too long post about an entirely different way of viewing things:

    I have accounts at... I guess about eight instances. I didn't see any reason to pick one, so I just signed up for everything that looked interesting and promising.

    I expected to eventually settle on one, but as it turns out, I actually like having multiple accounts. I have four that I rotate between at the moment. Oh, and with the same username on each, though I still haven't decided if that's a good idea or not.

    First, I have a kbin account and multiple lemmy accounts. Even though lemmy has more users, I much prefer kbin just as far as the software goes - it's just a better UI. And Ernest is awesome.

    Beyond that though, each instance is a different experience, since the federated communities on each one are different, depending on what other instances they're federated with and which communities from which instances people have subscribed to. And I've amplified that by having different sets of subscriptions on different instances.

    Kbin.social has a good mix of content but without most of the botfarm instances. I like that. That's where I do virtually all of my serious posting.

    Lemmy.world (when it's up) has a wide range of content, but too much of it, even not counting the bots, is too shallow IMO. It feels too much like Reddit for my tastes. It is the best one to check in on for the most popular topics though, and it's where I'm most likely to be subscribed to communities for memes, humor, drama, pictures - all that sort of junk.

    Lemmy.one actually feels like what it is - an instance that demands that users behave themselves. It's nice when I want to just unwind, because it's already the case that problematic instances are defederated, and I have a limited set of feel good subs there. I almost never post from there though, since I don't trust myself to behave.

    Lemmy.ninja is my favorite. It's just quirky little instance with terrific admins and an amusing aesthetic. It's little though - 120 users last I heard. That shows in its all, which is fairly limited, presumably just because few people means few subscriptions so few federated communities. That's fine though - it's a selection that matches my interests fairly well. And ninjas are cool.

    And I'm still on the lookout for a serious, scholarly sort of instance - somewhere that will be a comfortable home for subs to philosophy communities and the like.

  • I initially went with Kbin and Beehaw since it was clear that kbin and lemmy were going to mostly diverge on key features from the start. At the time, Beehaw was getting a ton of traffic thanks to the join-lemmy homepage placing them at the top of the suggested instances list, so there was no real criteria that went into my choice other than that.

    Eventually deleted my Beehaw account though, after the admins made it clear they were not prepared for the influx and were being rather dramatic about their defederation choices as a result. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and while I understand their stance was "safe place first, popular site second" it just didn't vibe with what I expected from an open reddit alternative.

    Moved to VLemmy after that, and we all know how that went, but my rationale was that it was a growing but moderately small instance.

    Afterwards I made 2 new accounts: one on infosec.pub and the other on lemdro.id.

    At this point I'm mostly sticking with the Lemdro.id account, since they seem to be offering some very friendly support via their matrix space, and they have some apparently unique changes to backend to make it a very fast and easy to scale instance.

    My kbin.social and infosec.pub accounts are mostly just alts gathering dust as a result.

    • Interesting, thanks for your feedback.

      they have some apparently unique changes to backend to make it a very fast and easy to scale instance.

      Shouldn't that be merged into the Lemmy platform at some? It would probably benefit everyone

      • I don't know enough about the specifics to say whether or not it's something that would be useful upstream. It's possible that it's just their unique combination of software & hardware that makes it work the way it does.

        I'm sure someone in their Matrix server could offer more insight.

  • I've been on quite a few. But I mostly was on lemmy.world but their reliability is low. So I switched to Lemmy.ca who federated with basically everyone. Unlike World. I was on .ml for a while too but left for some reason. I'm also on Beehaw, I like it over there but it'll never be my home instance mostly because you can't create communities and they don't federate with most of the ones I like. Being on Lemmy.ca allows me to interact with World and Beehaw from one account which is really nice. They also have really high up time!

  • My Mastodon account is on mastodon.sdf.org When the whole Reddit-o-pocalypse went down SDF spun up a Lemmy instance a few days later I asked to join They now have a handful of Lemmy instances regionally

  • There's also the niche hobby based instances. Such as the TTRPG, pathfinder, startrek, etc. (There's also mine for books & writing..)

  • I'm new to it all so I registered on lemmy.world and subscribed to several communities. I also registered and subscribed to the same communities on lemmy.ee. When lemmy.world is down, I use lemmy.ee, but those subscribed communities that are local on lemmy.world are no longer accessible. I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessable. Is this not true?

    • I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?

      This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.

      Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn't live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren't cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.

      When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won't be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I'm not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).

      Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn't designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).

      I might have some details wrong here. I'm more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.

    • Hello,

      Thank you for your message. You might want to have a look at https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim to sync subs between accounts.

      I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessable.

      They are, but not in the way you think: if you follow community@lemmy.world from lemm.ee, and then lemmy.world goes down, you can still see the content of that community on lemm.ee, it does not become unavailable to you.

      I hope this answers your question

  • Stability – So, uptime and rate at which it updates with Lemmy.

    Moderation – One or two good Admins at least to keep things running smoothly and communicate with us Lemmings effectively, and have a decent ruleset.

    Federation – Wide enough that I can get the content I'm looking for whilst (likely) not dealing with nutjobs.

    The rest is all good, the federated nature of everything means I don't really need to be where the communities I use the most are.

  • General-purpose Lemmy instance. New users and communities welcome! Has upvoting and downvoting. Also, federated with most instances.

141 comments