How do you choose an instance and does that have a significant effect on your Lemmy experience?
I originally chose to make my account on lemmy.world since all the content seemed to come from there. But I've since learned that I can fill my feed with stuff from any instance so it feels like it doesn't actually matter if I'm on lemmy.world or not. At the same time, Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack so I'm wondering if I should change instance but have no idea what I should even be looking for when choosing.
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A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what's missing is defederation policy.
Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you're on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I'm on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there's a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.
Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that's due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That's their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).
//edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will 'live' on your instance, and thus be under your instance's rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don't today intend to create any communities, it's good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.
Tbf, beehaw plans to refederate with lemmy.world once either the moderation tools for lemmy get better or lemmy.world makes it harder for trolls to just make a new lemmy.world account when banned from beehaw.
True, but that brings up another point which I just edited into my parent comment- instance rules. Any communities you create will be hosted on your home instance and thus subject to your home instance's rules. So you should make sure those rules align with the sort of activity you'll want to be doing.
This could always change at the whim of an admin as well. It’s good to have admin “teams” and even foundations, but a lot of the time there’s one person making those decisions.
Users and communities could be more portable. Admins should get to decide what is on their instance for sure, but right now there’s kind of a “lock in.” Which give admins disproportional control / responsibility. IMO.
Yes I agree—a big part of choosing an instance is who they are defederated with.