How do you choose an instance and does that have a significant effect on your Lemmy experience?
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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Depending on which instances are blocked you will see different content in ones or others. Which is why I choose instance based on the minimum number of blocked users based on the results of this script.
You mean blocked instances right? AFAIK an instances “blocked users” is not published in aggregate. You’d have to comb through the modlog.
I don't know there is a lemmy-stats-crawler utility that does it automatically and produces a json file. So all I do is parse that json file to get the numbers.
Ahh. I see. I took a look at the script. "Blocked Users," is not reported by an instance, but rather It's calculated by this script by looking at "Blocked Instances," which is reported. How many active users each blocked instance has and then summing this together, the script shows "BU." I was thinking it was an explicit list of users the instance blocked based on ban/block lists.
It's a derivative, but still useful metric, I guess. BU could be high, but BI could be low and vice-versa.
I basically did the same thing. Wrote a script to get a list of instances and how many instances they were federated with, blocked, and blocked by. Chose my instance based on those numbers after looking at a few of the top candidates.