Is it just me or did Lemmy suddenly became more active now that Sync for Lemmy is released?
I don't know if this is just a placebo effect, but it feels like there's a lot more socialization and faster upvotes in the past hour Sync was released.
I don't mind lemmy.world being recommended to newcomers as it's run by an established and reliable admin (so it's unlikely to just disappear), but it might be a good idea to start recommending lemm.ee as an alternative, too.
Their admin is also great, it's also general-purpose, and they are federated with most instances. It would help spread the load a bit, and would shield newcomers from suffering through the frequent attacks .world have been subjected to recently.
The argument about instances disappearing has less to do with size and more to do with who runs it. Ruud having a track record with Mastodon.world suggests .world won't be another vlemmy situation.
Lemmy.sdf.org is another great instance to recommend for the same reason.
Probably not a good idea to support just a few instances with reputation because that again eliminates 99% of instances from the Lemmy network.
I rather see it grow than to become a handful of people running instances. The more the better. It's the same mindset as in open source I think. Everyone contributes and feels included.
I'm speaking from the viewpoint of onboarding newcomers, many of whom are not going to be tech-savvy. Keep in mind one of the most common complaints from people hesitant to try out Lemmy is that it seems "too complicated". Sure, you could tell them:
"Okay, first go to the Fediverse Map and find some instances that are hosted close to your geographical location. Look at their stats and find a couple that seem to have good uptime. Now go explore each of them and look at what rules and policies they have, how their admins are behaving and what their plans for funding are medium-long term. Then just pick the one that comes out best in this evaluation!"
This is how I signed up where I did, but let's be realistic and accept that this will not be a viable pitch to onboard most people.