What made you choose your instance?

kratoz29@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 267 points –

Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I'm intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don't know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it.

That made me curious of how you decided to join?

I firstly join to lemmy.fmhy.ml thanks to Spez and a Reddit post from FMHY subreddit, then the tragedy occurred, then I joined to lemmy.world which is/was my main one because I pictured it like a good home, then lemmy.fmhy.net revived and I am with them too, but seems like they are in a bit of trouble with the server, finally now I am in lemm.ee, but only because I just wanted another backup, not because I searched for it especially (also it was mentioned in a comment about smaller instances and one user from here throw a joke to not join here because it sucks so that way the server would be more stable, so yeah, I joined).

To be clear I am not in search for yet another instance (that sounds like a good instance name to be fair), I just want to know how the deciding process is for you, is it just random? Is it because of personal tastes?

I couldn't care less about NSFW stuff, I don't search for it specifically, but my day won't be ruined if I see a tit.

I like gaming, tech, Linux, SBC gaming, emulation, macOS, Android stuff etc (yeah how original) should I look for an instance dedicated to that if I ever want to join yet another one? Because I see topics like this in almost any instance.

I read you lemmings!

EDIT: BTW the migration process has been easier for me thanks to LASIM, so I wouldn't be scared if I ever want/have to migrate again.

455

I'm the admin :P

Why’d you start an instance?

We started a regular fediverse instance because we wanted a space for queer and gender diverse folk to be safe, on something that wasn't Mastodon or Mastodon derived.

Once we had that running, we spun up a lemmy instance just to check it out, and it sat there basically only used by me, until Reddit Day came along, and our userbase went from 3 to 3000 in the space of a week. So now, our lemmy instance serves the same purpose as our main instance, which is to provide a safe space for our community, but focused on lemmy/the threadiverse

It’s good to hear that even small instances benefitted from Reddit Day and not just lemmy.world

Every instance that pre-dated Reddit Day saw crazy growth during the migration.

We were around long before lemmy.world, and despite the small userbase, we had a couple of popular (at the time) communities used by the rest of the lemmyverse.

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It's a good option for when you want to follow every instance and not be beholden to the server admin randomly de-federating an instance they don't agree with personally (which was one one of the issues Reddit faced, mods with their own agenda)

If you run your own instance you can choose exactly what you get to interact with

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Yeah this one right here. I run my own little instance, made it easy to choose.

One of my favorite parts of lemmy has been seeing what niche servers users come in from. The interconnectivity makes it feel like a universe of forums.

The smaller community sizes adds to that forum-vibe, I think.

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I was on lemmygrad at first but then they banned me for being a liberal so now I'm on hexbear

Youre better off. Lemmygrad is like 90% Russian propagandists. Dudes think editing a commercial to whiten skin tone is the same as genociding children.

Reminds me of late stage 4chan and r/the_donald

As a Hexbear user, I personally get paychecks from both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for every comment. It's a pretty sweet gig ngl.

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I’ve been on Hexbear the entire time. It’s inclusive, yet has zero tolerance for reactionary attitudes.

Also since federation we actually have been complaining the quality of posts we see have gone down. You all lack an energy that made r/cth and hexbear such a breath of fresh air.

From my perspective, most hexbear users seem to have a very noticeable but different energy entirely. Although I think that's mostly down to (most) of you guys moving from reddit to HB and then curating your own space there with all kinds of bells and whistles, communication styles, communities etc.

Aside from the (very high) usage of emotes, theres something about the posts that make it really noticeable

We're an old instance by lemmy standards, and have been really active for several years. We had a big boom after the reddit-logo CTH banning, and then just kind of got left to our own devices for a few years. The site developed a much more distinctive culture than most other places because of that--it feels more like an old message board from the 90s or 00s than a modern social media site. It's great.

I think one thing that stands us out among other spaces on the internet is rejection of common referential humor, this space almost demands you develop your own thing, and enjoy our beautifully curated collection of emotes left-unity-4 Also our moderation is pretty top notch, and you get a sense it’s okay to fail here. It gives you a fearlessness. Like, we dont make small dick jokes here about people we dont like because we dont want to hurt anyone who does have a small dick in the community, also because it reinforces bs masculinity tropes. So this means we have to approach from new angles and this limitation fosters a creativity in us. And I think you can have this too, with enough time.

We dont all like lazy humor or really cheap shots, and cherish bits and running jokes with each other. Have you seen our owl? It’s very dirty.

Came to Hexbear because the CTH subreddit was kill and I really hate trying to follow a super active Discord, then TC69 lead the purge of the rightists and it became so good that basically no other website scratches my social media itch anymore. Reddit's still useful since there's so much archived content on places like /r/linux but that's the only reason I go there anymore, Lemmy as a whole seems pretty cool though.

I started with Lemmy.world but then moved to Lemmy.nz because it was faster.

I’m on both, but using memmy on iOS I really don’t even notice which instance I’m on anymore. It takes me back to using Apollo

i joined chacha as a lifeboat years ago when the CTH reddit got banned and stayed as it became Ursus hexagonalis. the lack of ads, the memes, irreverence for institutions combined with respect for humans, and the absolute god-tier emoji selection is what keeps me here.
meow-fiesta

also, the megathread topics are very interesting/informative as a People's History, since many of the stories come from the "periphery" for all my world systems nerds out there. living in the imperial core, the constant cacophony of cultural outputs and hegemonic discourses, i appreciate any channel that connects me with post-colonial narratives, critical theory, etc.

glasses-on fanon sankara-salute

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I followed the Daystrom Institute community from reddit to startrek.website.

I have a few different accounts. One on lemmy.world, but that's been down so much, I decided I needed a backup, and quite frankly, the fact that there's an entire Trek instance made my choice of a backup a no-brainer.

Even though I was on Reddit for 9 years, I never frequented r/startrek until this year and saw the mod posts about starting a fresh Lemmy instance. Being a member of the Federation in the Fediverse just really appealed to my geek brain.

I still remember the sub citations-needed chomsky-yes-honey

moved there from lemmy.world because of downtime and also unclear, sloppy defederation policies. i've never seen a clear explanation why it took a month to defederate exploding heads (allowing their userbase to grow 3x) and week for rammy site, but hexbear gets defederated "preemptively". ???

also now i see beehaw content which is something i didn't expected, but it's cool

Same, ever since I joined lemmy.world I had a feeling that they were way too trigger-happy with the defederation button, but I was trying to not pay a lot of mind to it and just assume good faith in the admins. But the Hexvear fiasco was absolute bullshit that made that assumption impossible for me. And I don't even particularly care about Hexbear lol

So I have been visiting other instances and made an alt account on lemmygrad just in case.

don't get me wrong, i don't want to be anywhere near exploding-heads, so in this case they were too slow to defederate, and in case of hexbear, well hexbear doesn't seem to leak like that so it's nonissue in the first place

tchncs.de has longer blocklist, and i guess it's because of german law. not complaining tho

Yeah, I agree. I just think the decision to defederate should not be taken unilaterally & on a whim by admins. I don't know why it took them so long with exploding heads, but if it was because they were consulting the userbase, I can see a justification for it taking so long. Defederating from Hexbear on the other hand, before telling anyone and even before they have the chance to federate back, is unacceptable IMO

That's all the reason I moved from lemmy.world to lemme.ee. I decided to keep that account for porn which also got defederated. Going to delete lemmyworld account.

Beehaw cuz I heard they had strong moderation and don't shy away from defederation. Also bees.

Beehaw for basically the same reasons. I liked the low tolerance for bad faith arguments in addition to the strong moderation and defederation from the “Free speech” (free to say what?) Wild West instances. It’s a good instance for user safety and maintaining mental health.

I’ve got a startrek.website account as backup.

I’ve been in one other community with the same moderation style and I think it works great 🐝

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Same. I still have other accounts, but this is my preference by a country mile.

I have a few accounts, but mainly stick to Beehaw at this point. It just feels different in a good way.

It seems to have died down now, but there seemed to be much hate for it for a week or so after the great Reddit migration. That was originally what got me to try it though.

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Hi fellow Beehaw user, I couldn't see you in my lemmy.world account.

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I was on r/chapotraphouse before we got banned from Reddit. I joined chapo.chat after it was made by old r/cth users, and chacha became hexbear.net like maybe a year later.

Shit just works. Except when it goes down. But mostly. Still, the name is fire.

Yeah I have stated before I chuckle when your instance is down, merely because of the name lol.

I would have choose this one but went to lemmy.world.

Honestly, I liked that they followed electoral politics, helping me fulfill my sick, taboo desires.

Started on kbin.social and beehaw.org. Realized I liked Lemmy just a little more early on and stuck with Beehaw. But then they started to defederate from larger instances with open signups. So I joined lemmy.world to be part of the bigger picture. Then it got too big and people want to play the DDoS game, so now I've got this alt on lemm.ee as well. We'll see where it goes from here. 😂

This was my exact trajectory and reasoning, but I ended up adding lemmings.world after that. 😅

This is a journey we should tell to our grandkids.

The server is hosted in my country, the TLD belongs to my country and the current admins seem chill and dedicated to make it work. Hopefully that's the recipe to it's longevity.

Once they add some donation method I'll gladly donate and if they need help I'll gladly offer my technical knowledge.

I'm a scientist so I joined the instance that seemed to match my interests the best. I like browsing Local and seeing all the other science posts as well

I mean I joined it 3 years ago because I followed r/cth from reddit and for a while it was pretty much the only active instance

What was that subreddit about?

It was originally made to be for fans of the podcast "Chapo Trap House" but it doesn't parrot what they say and in fact has strong points of disagreement with them, and has since it was a popular subreddit (I still listen to it). It was an early joke that the official podcast of the sub was Citations Needed, because that's a much better podcast that we were much more aligned with in most respects. By this point on Hexbear, I'd say it's probably most in line with The Deprogram.

In terms of actual content, it's mostly talking about news and history and making memes based on those

When the reddit went bad I started looking for anti-corporate communities that would migrate.

r/cyberpunk was the first place I checked, but there was no discussion about migrating at all there. r/selfhosted was another obvious idea but people there seemed very reluctant as well.

The only sub that pointed to some clear migration path was r/piracy. I really appreciate the integrity of dbzer0 in this situation.

How is the moderation and everything in that instance?

The community has been very calm and respectful so I've never really had to think about the moderation. I can't remember the last time I've seen a deleted comment for example, and I've certainly never seen a hateful post or comment.

Other than that, the admin, db0 is quite left-leaning (or at least anti-capitalist), but so am I, so it never really bothered me.

To be completely honest, this is the only instance that I have an account in, so I can't really compare it to the others, but it just felt like home to me.

I want to say pirate culture has a strong history is deplatforming, so it's almost instinct to have a migration fallback plan. But I know they used to have a fallback on raddle.me (anarchist reddit clone) when reddit started forcing them not to host or supply links to content. They had good reason to be prepared and it paid off.

I started on Beehaw but created a second account on lemmy.world since I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any content. Once the slowdowns started I took a deeper dive into different instances and saw there was one centered around music and production and this would fit me best. I still use all three but I still think this will be home for me.

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I'm the admin. Why? Because I enjoy doing, it's in the spirit of decentralisation, and I didn't want to risk being part of an instance that defederates from leftist instances like Lemmygrad or Hexbear.

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I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn't make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

But I'm still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.

IDK I just kinda ended up here. The domain is easy to memorize, I guess.

(Edit: And it never goes down cause no one uses it.)

(Edit: And it never goes down cause no one uses it.)

🤫

Found some power tripping mods in some instances, lemmy.ml seems fairly neutral.

Huh really? Haven't occurred to me yet.

I like science and Mander has a lot of neat science communities. I also keep a back up account for Lemmy.world.

I want to check out this instance because I found some cool communities on there!

I missread beehaw as yeehaw, was only slightly dissapointed when I noticed.

I started out on Lemmy.world because it seemed like it was going to be home to the most communities, and people seemed to like & respect the admin.

But I also work on software, and I’m here for all the computer nerd shit Lemmy has to offer. Plus World has had uptime issues. So programming.dev seemed like a good home instance to try out, even if I’m interacting with a bunch of communities on World too.

I am no dev, neither programmer, but I like all the world that comes with it, I self host some shit and my Linux machine is a Synology NAS, I would be lying if I say I am not interested at all in your community.

Myyy community? ☺️

And thanks for the first reply to what may be my forever account, lol.

I was told, by someone I know in a local Discord, that it was a reddit replacement for Midwest leftists. At the time I didn't know what Lemmy was. Now that I'm using it in place of reddit, it's performing very well. I like our local instance a lot. I am tempted to move to Startrek.website though, just because I'm a huge nerd

I chose Lemmy World simply because it was there. It was literally the first one that popped up and I had no clue how Lemmy worked so I chose that one.

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I first joined Lemmy.ml and beehaw because when I joined those were pretty much the only active English language instances. I moved to lemmy.ca because Lemmy.ml started going down more when redditors showed up, and I didn't like beehaw's "defederate now and sort it out later" attitude. Plus I figured going with a mid sized instance is best. They aren't going to get overloaded because they are too big, and aren't going to shut down due to lack of interest either.

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I didn't pick one.

I spread that shit out over a bunch of instances.

Decentralized myself lol. There's no need to think of lemmy in terms of a single home. You can do that, but I prefer to think of it as a bunch of crash pads. Bounce between them as needed, maintain the accounts, and even if one homie can't put you up for the night, another one can.

Decentralized myself

That's the way I see it.

I've got several identities spread across different regions, interests, and TLDs in preparation for varying levels of interference all the way from defederation to government intervention.

This appears to be the new way forward, and I'm down.

Edit: grammar

I just made my own... I buy domains like steam games, never to be used/played, so finding a use for one is fun

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I was initially on lemmy.world, but the frequent DDOS attacks and the fact that Hexbear and Beehaw had defederated from it really put me off. Also, communities like !linux and !privacy were much bigger on lemmy.ml compared to lemmy.world.

Soo I jumped ship to lemmy.ml

Hexbear and Beehaw had defederated from it

Not sure if you're just phrasing it that way for the sake of brevity but, while Beehaw did defederate from World, it was World that defederated from Hexbear (Beehaw also defederated from Hexbear). Hexbear right now is slowly branching out since it was isolated for compatibility reasons before, but theoretically I think it would have already federated with World if World hadn't blocked it. Not sure about Beehaw.

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lemmy.ca because it's Canadian.

It's also a smaller instance, and I wanted to avoid joining a monolithic instance like world or beehaw, in favour of a smaller community I can feel a part of.

... But primarily because it's Canadian honestly.

I joined sh.itjustworks because of the fact that it's powered by renewable energy and it's bilingual with French and English. As someone who wants to stop climate change and someone who is learning French, it made the most sense for me to join this instance. I have no alts, but if I were to make one it would probably be on lemmy.world, blajah.zone, or dbzer0.

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Was looking for a Furry server and yiffit was too funny for me not to join

Kept having stability issues with the instances I joined. One of them even dissapeared completely (rip vlemmy). I ended up on a anarchy/piracy one and it's been the best experience so far.

It was suggested by the sign up process at the top of which domain I should join. I don't remember how, it's already a blur, but afterwards I saw people saying the registration process needed to add a way of directing users to smaller instances as a thing to lighten the load and stop everyone going to lemmy.world and it confused me because that's literally what happened to me.

Anyway I also noticed it had a steam deck community and that was good enough for me.

Was on r/cth, was on the lifeboat discord which wasn't functional for me, migrated to chapo chat which was instantly the largest lemmy instance by a couple of orders of magnitude in terms of posts per day and active users. Not been too outgoing in this space, sometimes I go to lemmygrad or lemmy.ml if I run out of content.

It was a battle between my queer identity and my biologist identity. For regular browsing and posting, science won out. But I have an account with blajah.zone too to discuss the queer agenda.

"my day won't be ruined if I see a tit."

This is glorious :-)

I chose lemmy.world for my main account, mostly for the name. Just sounds like a central place to be. I've bailed on one instance on account of them dragging their feet on defederating from exploding heads.

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Thought the domain was funny and the owner is a pretty cool person that be let me start a community

I made this account a long time ago, the landscape was different. The three biggest (federated) instances were this, lemmygrad.ml and Wolfballs (alt-right, run by a right-libertarian but dominated by shameless racists and neo-nazis, most instances defederated from them).

Since Lemmygrad was often preemptively defederated from other instances, I wanted a stable well-connected instance that wouldn't die after a few months (learned that lesson the hard way on PeerTube) and am a socialist tech-expert. So the choice was simple. No regrets, and I wouldn't change it now.

I did have an alt on the former GTIO instance (civil debate only, no political-oriented bans) because I did want to see the garbage being posted by Wolfballs losers on there and practice deconstructing the flaws and refuting. I also had an alt on an instance that wasn't federated at the time. They were all appropriate choices given the landscape then and now, and I've had the foresight and fortune to almost never have an instance I use block one I wish to interact with. But unfortunately many so-called general instances have made dubious defederation choices which do make me worry that I may need to start making alts just to continue interacting with some communities in the future.

Im french (and i like smaller instances that just work) We're a small community grouped around a few local sublemmies and i really like it that way

well i tried to join programming.dev because i'm a developer and i figured devs would run a fast server, but I didn't get the email they said I'd get when my account was approved. By the time I worked out the account was active anyway, I'd created an account on a geographical server and it's fast as with zero downtime so I'm sticking with it. Set up a monthly donation to keep it running and I'm super happy with it, the admin seems cool.

Setting up email is a fuck. Every once in a while I check the mail server for my mastodon instance and there's always sign-up mails which were undeliverable. The server is only on two block-lists and those block-lists block the whole IP range because it is a VPS host. Most providers work, but iCloud and ProtonMail in particular reject everything.

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I started on Lemmy World, because I could. I didn’t truly get the decentralized nature of the Fediverse, so I went with a larger instance thinking that was best for longevity.

Now that I understand how things work, I’ve picked up a few more accounts/instances (including one on Kbin) as backups and currently use Lemm.ee as my main account.

Ultimately, I would like to start my own instance for me and my family.

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I was on lemmy.world at first but it's constantly down so I started searching for a new instance. I fell in love with the lemmy.zip color theme.

For me the choice was easy: I was already into the fediverse thanks to Mastodon and then (before all the reddit api drama) some lovely people I had already heard about decided to spin up a general purpose Italian Lemmy instance, and so far I couldn't be happier for my experience here.

Maybe I was just lucky but what I would suggest is try to see if there is a small/medium sized instance of your university/city/country as I think they are the ones that works our best (not just for Lemmy but for the fediverse in general)

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I picked my instance because it wasn't too big or too small, and it federates with basically everyone.

Mander gets my seal of approval. Since the start, it's been what a federated community should be. It has a clear scope and is open for basically everyone to use, not trying to be a redundant general-purpose instance creating the tenth community named '196' and banning half the instances from using it.

I vape nicotine (former smoker) and I smoke weed. Not as much as I used to, but I had difficulty finding an instance with personal interest, so the one I am on seemed good.

I'm on Kbin.social because it was being recommended a lot when all the Reddit stuff was happening and there weren't any hoops to jump through when signing up.

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I joined lemmy.world because it was the biggest.

Defederation didn't seem to be an issue at first, though I would like to know what exactly I'm missing out on (within reason... Not a fan of bigotry) But the performance issues are making me wonder if I should switch.

EDIT: I do kind of want to be on an instance that federates with both lemmy.world and beehaw. Any recommendations?

lemm.ee federates both world and beehaw and i have seen a few users from there so its probably fine

I have joined several instances and all have their pros and cons, but I'll plug the most recent one (lemmings.world) because it checked all of these boxes for me:

  • Federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org
  • Not federated with certain more problematic instances
  • Stable/good uptime record
  • Upvotes/downvotes, community creation and image uploads enabled
  • I liked the name
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I first joined lemmy.dbzer0.com for the piracy and because the instance owner is an anarchist (or at least he claims to be, I don't really know that), then I got locked out of my bitwarden so I decided to make another account at reddthat.com so I don't have to type another essay to apply for lemmy.dbzer0.com (they've been application only since the spam bot threat and the temporary captcha removal from the code in Lemmy 18.0) And I chose reddthat because the name sounds fun, like reddit, but instead of read-it, it's read-that. Very pun-ny 😆

I don't really like reddthat after finding out that they disabled downvotes (they used ti allow downvoted if I remember correctly), but I don't want to deal with creating another account again so here I am.

If I forget my password again (let's hope not), I'd probably use lemmy.fmhy.net (formerly lemmy.fmhy.ml) because of piracy and no applications.

[…] so I don't have to type another essay to apply for lemmy.dbzer0.com

Just FYI: My entire application message was a single sentence and it was approved in less than an hour.

Oh.. well if you ever consider to jump, check out the tool I linked, it will only take you a few minutes!

I hope migration tools like this improve to fetch all account data like upvotes, comments, posts, saved etc...

I was on world but people are assholes and kept ddos-ing it and heard lemm.ee was pretty good. Can confirm lemm.ee is pretty good. Bonus: beehaw doesn't defederate lemm.ee and their communities are pretty cool.

Can someone go tell beehaw to federate with Hexbear

I think it would be an uphill battle, since they were very loud about it and the accusations they were making against hexbear to justify it. Nonetheless, I think people from other instances telling them to reverse the decision would be good.

Do we know why beehaw doesn't defederate?

What is it so different from this and lemmy.world?

IIRC their reason was world got pretty big (still is) and spam was coming to the instance. So beehaw decided to defederate until world solved their spam problem. However, as they say, "out of sight, out of mind" so beehaw may just forget about refederating world if they do fix the spam. Who knows

I haven't checked it out since before the reddit API influx so things may be different now, but from memory they were explicitly centred around being super friendly and pleasant, to the point where normal disagreements by people on other instances were banworthy there. So they were very quick to defederate from many other instances, especially anything liberal (as in, libre; freedoms) or political.

They don't want to defederate from any other instance so I can decide if I don't want to view anything.

I joined Beehaw first because I like their philosophy, the admins seem pretty level headed, and they're decently large. But they defederated from/were never federated with a couple of instances that I was interested in, so I made my own instance and am here now.

I did something similar with Beehaw, but found that Lemmy was making my Nas so much louder because of all the data it was writing to disk. So I decided to join programming.dev instead. Some day I want to host my own again but it's on hold for now

My poor NAS would explode if I ever want to self host an instance lol.

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By selecting something from the top of the list at the time, I ended up on vlemmy.net. Then that went down after a few days. So I created an account on lemmy.world. With that instance, everything seemed buggy, and I was constantly logged out and unable to load my account.

So I made an account ln whatever I'm on now.

To me, this seems like a big drawback for lemmy. Creating an account doesn't guarantee any persistence unless you host your own instance. So the bar is not low for new users.

Something like periodic backups would be nice to have... Probably later, Lemmy is so new after all.

Also, do we know what happened with vlemmy?

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I chose my current one because it offered Alexandrite as a front-end, and I didn't realise I could've just gone to alexandrite.app and used it for my old instance ('cos I'm stoopid).

Wait can we do this? Haha

I am gonna try it, is it also possible with the old.lemmy interface?

It is, along with a bunch of alternative frontends. The old.lemmy one is mlmym with the dev's deployment at mlmym.org or you can self-host it using the docker image.

Started at Lemmy.world. Also made an account on Kbin.social. And Mastodon.social. Just checking out what the Fediverse was all about. Now I’m on Artemis.camp as a beta tester for the Artemis App and loving it!

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Because Canada, woo! My definitely not picked on a whim choice has yet to fail me though, I haven't personally experienced any downtime or slowdowns and I like the community overall.

Originally started out on Beehaw due to the name. I like bees. I like cowboys. Win-win. Then they defederated from the two biggest instances, and I lost out on a lot of great communities.

Ended up switching to Reddthat since the name / URL was easy for my ADHD brain to remember and didn’t require typing a novel to join.

Learned about it when they banned chapo. The chapo fork wasn't a good fit for me. Mostly hang out on twitter and use this to post articles or look for longer discussion

I’m just a sh.ithead.

Seriously though, the community is awesome, love the name, and TheDude abides.

The name is gold honestly, and it is awesome that it is always at top of join-lemmy lol.

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It depends on the instance - I have multiple accounts.

Kbin.social because I like the kbin software better than the lemmy software, and because Ernest is awesome.

Lemmy.world because it's definitive (when it's up).

Lemmy.one because it requires people to not be assholes.

Lemmy.ninja because the admins somehow manage to be both diligent and goofy, and because ninjas are cool.

vlemmy.net went away and lemmy.world seemed pretty active so here we are. I'm also set up on sh.itjust.works because I love the name of it.

I wanted to go local and the closest instances were either Finnish or Danish and I went Finnish because I'd rather not accidentally order ten litres of milk every time I try to say something

Also this is where the fountain pen community originally was. They've since moved to wayfarer but honestly? I kinda like it here. Small instance and it's name isn't just Lemmy.somethingrather like most places are. I do one day want to host my own instance though, so I can have the pride of adding yet another thing to my domain's umbrella.

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Honestly picked it just for the name alone. Scrolled through a giant list and was the first to give me a good chuckle.

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I have a similar story where I originally went with FMHY up until it went down. I decided to go with dbzer0 because they have a similar stance for discussing piracy.

That said, as far as I know, they have the same rule as /r/piracy when it comes to requesting or linking to content which I don't personally like. I enjoyed helping people find music and TV shows on FMHY. They also want to keep things SFW which I don't personally have strong feelings about one way or the other but I'd prefer an instance with an indifferent approach.

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I'm located in Canada so I picked between the local ones. I spent a lot of my time looking at subs for my city/province/school/Canada, so it seemed like a good call. I also liked going to places like bapcsalesCanada because I could actually make use of the information, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

It's also nice to have some influence over where my data is stored and the laws around it.

I'm on slrpnk.net

I wanted originally to join one of the big ones, but figured that I should distribute the load by going for a smaller instance. I was scrolling through a list of instances and saw the logo and the name. I was already vaguely familiar with solarpunk, so I chose it because it appeals to me (environmental awareness, anarchism, optimism, DIY, upcycling, pragmatism and so on). To be completely honest, I had no idea what "choosing a home instance" entailed at the time.

Pretty happy with the decision though, it's a themed instance so locally I get stuff you'd expect, and when browsing all I mostly see stuff from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml and the rest.

Not a particularly interesting story, but nevertheless here it is.

Made my own for myself and some friends. We couldn't be bothered creating account on the larger instances and have power tripping admins de-federating instances over trivial issues.

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I was on lemmy.world. It has some power tripping admins and also most of the time it is under attack. So I switched to the current one and it is fine and fast and stable most of the time.

lemmy.world kept going down every other hour and I figured being a software engineer this instance made the most sense.

I'm on lemmy.world.

I joined while lemmy.ml was still the biggest instance. While I was picking an instance, I read that people should consider joining the smaller instances instead of lemmy.ml. I think the idea was to promote horizontal growth across lemmy instead of vertical growth on one instance. I picked lemmy.world because I liked the instance admin running it, and I wanted to help spread out the user base.

Didn't realize that lemmy.world would quickly become the biggest instance and encounter all the growing pains of rapid growth, but I still stick with this instance to be a part of identifying what those growing pains are so they can hopefully be fixed and grow Lemmy into a more mature platform that is capable of scaling up.

i started with lemmy.one, but then started up my own instance. It just feels good to diy.

Picked one with a funny name and the admin seemed quite relaxed but it appears to have gone offline permanently.

I'm a dev that likes to dabble in new things all the time and I have a pretty varied skillset that includes some DevOps chops. When I left Reddit and deleted my accounts after ~18 years being there, I wanted to be a real contributor to the Fediverse and not just a lurker or commenter. I continually got laughs out of the stories about orcas capsizing yachts, and thus the URL for my instance was born (I wanted it to be more playful and tongue-in-cheek, hence the "enjoying" part).

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An overwhelming desire to never be taken seriously by the average user.

Honestly, because of my interest, as you can tell from my instance's name and purpose. It's the first furry instance I see and also the most popular one, that's the initial reason.

My main activity on Reddit is wetshaving related. A cool user there started this instance so I joined it. We've set it up as similarly to the subreddit as possible as far as rules and organization goes.

That's a cool tool that you linked to! Instances will undoubtedly come and go over the years, and it's good to know something like that exists.

I joined lemmy.ml because 1 year ago (yes I'm old I know) it was the biggest and most active instance, also it was, very importantly, the most federated with others I believe, the other candidate was lemmygrad but I feared (and that fear came true) fediblocks and defederations

Was looking for a smaller kbin instance to help out with decentralization, saw an ad for kbin.cafe and signed up

Honestly I just liked the icon and it didn't seem like a shitty place to be. A smaller instance also basically guaranteed a username I would like to use was available.

we bacily have a similar story, i use to be in lemmy.fmhy.ml because of how open it was to discussion but i believe its gone now which stinks, so i moved to lemm.ee which im ok with at the moment, i guess.

As I have stated, they are back at lemmy.fmhy.net, so be sure to check it out!

Our community always cared a lot about decentralization, so naturally we had to have our own instance, even before the reddit api exodus. It only made sense to use the instance of the community I vibe with. Besides this, we offer:

  • closed signup to limit bot account creation, you need either manual verification or a signup fee for anonymous users
  • high performance instance which is entirely community funded with the signup fees + anonymous donations
  • unlimited access to the fediverse, there's no de-federation unless required by law

I'm on feddit.it because it's an Italian-speaking instance, so I can read local posts from all kinds of subjects in my own language

This seems like a good reasoning, I think instances of my natal country exists, but I would be hesitant to join them because, if they are not using a VPS of sorts I know our internet infrastructure fucking sucks lol.

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Is there any way to export saved messages and comments to a new account?

Started with a really small instance, didn't really have a whole lot of content in All and struggled to find communities, so I joined lemmy.world, which got me a lot more content and communities, but now it's constantly having issues. So I'm trying this instance (as an alt for now) because there is a federation helper running on it. I'm honestly not sure which instance I will stick with long-term.

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I found one for my regional area because I went looking for my state community, and I didn’t know how to join it from .world. Now that we’re spreading out, I’m using it as my main. I also use Kbin quite frequently too, tho, but they don’t have an iOS app yet so not as much.

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I chose lemmy.world because it felt the most neutral and least controversial. I also feel like there's enough "backing" behind it and feel semi-confident that it'll stick around.

Beehaw defederated lemmy.world, but has the best news. I didn’t want to join beehaw, and have family from Canada so…. ca it is

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at first I saw these strange domain names and didn't really know how Lemmy works...

I saw lemmy.world, it has thr "world" ending so I was like, okay, this is a worldwide instance, this is what I need.

I was wrong, now I know, but I like World.

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Beehaw because of their friendliness combined with a very low tolerance for trolls and hate speech, plus Kbin.social because they haven’t defederated with any major instances.

Started with wirebase.org because it's local, but there was a lot of downtime. Switched to lemmy.sdf.org because they're also local, but are also a really old group that still hosts Usenet stuff. I've recently learned that they have never defederated though, and so I'm considering leaving because I don't believe in giving a platform to obvious disinformation and hate campaigns.

Started on lemmy.ml, when they were experiencing some performance issues I decided to "be distributed" away from one of the main instances. Decided on one geographically in my home country.

Started with lemm.ee just because it was the first instance I found when I looked up lemmy. Moved over to lemmy.world when I tried to customise my profile a bit and hit the image size cap but now I’m spending most of my time back on lemm.ee anyway because lemmy.world seems to be offline most of the time.

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I looked at it, it seemed mostly vanilla, had good servers, didn't have defederation drama like lemmy.world, thought it's cool.

I'd be open to move to a "leftist" lemmy instance, but as a staunch anarchist I'm not really compatible with lemmygrad or hexbear.

I'm an anarchist, and have been on Hexbear since the beginning. We're explicitly non-sectarian, and that's enforced. The left unity is actually part of what keeps me here. Folks are actually incredibly nice--it's one of the most positive and friendly online spaces I've been a part of in decades.

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Kinda picked it at random when scrolling through my choices.

This was recommended when I made my account. There weren't any regional communities for where I'm from, so Finland seems as good a choice as any.

I'm not sure I made an informed decision, but if there are real downsides to my choice I haven't noticed them yet. I seem to be able to see the things I want to. I have to use the block button liberally, but I can't see that being instance related. It's largely due to using All at times, and not having strong enough tagging/filtering tools to make that workable without blocking tons of communities that are fine, but not for me.

lemmy.world was the only one that didn't glitch out when I tried to join the day the reddit blackout started.

Only user on my instance - admittedly this is my mod account not my primary, it still lives elsewhere on one of the main instances. I'm still unsure if running a niche instance that's designed to host communities, if I should also open registration or not.

Because unilem has a policy of not defederating from other instances. If I see a post I don't want to see again I can block it, but it's my decision.

There is only one true instance: Chapo.chat and if I notice you are commenting from a different instance, you are immediately relegated to SECOND CLASS CITIZENRY in my mind. el-chapo

I started on .ml way before the reddit fallout. Once I actually started using it, I spun up my own instance.

But, based on these comments, hexbear.net sounds like a fun place....

Well, I created the instance I'm on so it seemed like a logical choice!

I created it primarily because I am a fan of self-hosting stuff, and I also figured it would be a cool way for me to contribute to the Fediverse - even if its not really that large.

I joined Kbin due to a Mastodon post around launch. I currently use Camp instance as I’m a beta tester for Artemis.
On Lemmy I join ml as that was what people on Reddit were doing. I’m beta testing Bean app. Artemis and Bean are two of the best and most beautiful apps.

I like the name and it's a smaller server than many which is nice