Why did you choose your instance?

I actually made my home in the one hosting a previous reddit community I was fond of, just choose one u like.

I was told it was better for load balancing if we didn't all use the same one. So I just looked for one that had easy signups and didn't seem overeager to block stuff. Apparently, some from this instance come form /r/china. I'm not, but I do drink coffee. Anyway, I think it's working out so far; better than reddit anyway.

lemmy.world seemed reputable with a straightforward domain name, and no out-of-the-ordinary policies.

I joined mander.xyz because it has a central theme around the natural sciences. It could possibly include STEM content as well; there is an ongoing discussion about it. The admin(s) are present and very responsive.

For anyone with a love of science and/or nature I recommend it highly as a home instance of Lemmy.

I switched off lemmy.ml for two reasons:

• I didn't want to be on the "main" instance, kinda defeats the point of federation.
• While they were testing UI 0.17 on the instance it totally broke the site for me on both my phone and PC, I couldn't click anything for nearly a week.

So I settled on lemm.ee as it was a general purpose instance that wasn't too big, and the admin is committed to staying around. And of course I was actually able to click on things. It's nice here!

Was looking for a furry one, and pawb.social seemed to be well-run (since it was related to a couple of decently-sized Mastodon servers) and was generic enough (and not NSFW focused). There also seemed to be a decent number of technical people there as well (in fact, one of the Mastodon instances is furry.engineer), so it matched up with my other interests as well. I considered lemmyrs.org, but ended up not choosing it.

It really doesn't matter too much. You can search for communities across the fediverse anyway.

I picked my regional one (technically also better for latency)