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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?

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  • 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.

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