In the couple months since I've been a Redditfugee, I had decided that Liftoff was the way to go. It still is, using it for this very post. Sync is down right now (traffic?), but so far it's houses ahead of any of the other apps for Lemmy I use like Thunder and Connect and yeah, Liftoff. I use the stacked(?) view so I don't see any ads
Sync isn't down, Lemmy.world is receiving heavier than normal traffic, because of sync. If you switch to a different instance, you don't get the warning popup.
Sync for Reddit users are now getting damn near the same exact experience here, that they were on reddit. Same UI we've been used to for years, and Lemmy content is easier to navigate through, and it opens you up to browse the instances version of r/all instead of just what you're subscribed to.
The search is nice too, because the couple things I looked for as far as 'subs' go, I've found multiples across different instances, each with a different variety of content.
That's just the default, and I assume it's mainly to make it easier for new users to start using Lemmy. It lets you change to any other instance during login.
Yeah, I've tested the app out. But the problem is that people who don't know any better (which almost none of new people do, me included when I was new) will just use the default. Which is down a lot. This causes two things:
forces lemmy.world to upgrade its hardware all the time
discourages new users from trying Lemmy because it doesn't work
Getting a list of some instances (that are not as overcrowded) and assigning one at random by default would be the best way to go about it.
I mean, it's obviously fine for them (the problems will probably get stable after some time and they gain more users in the process), but it's not good for Lemmy overall and not for new users.
Honestly I think having a default one is necessary for users to put their trust in the service. If there's no lemmy.world, another server will become the go to (it used to be lemmy.ml before world). People want to have their account on the instance all their friends have it on so that they'd never be alone in losing their account or the service being offline for them. And the bigger the instance, the more trustworthy it seems.
Lemmy.world has also been a tremendous help in debugging performance issues due to necessity.
Honestly I think having a default one is necessary for users to put their trust in the service
As I said:
Getting a list of some instances (that are not as overcrowded) and assigning one at random by default would be the best way to go about it.
People want to have their account on the instance all their friends have it on so that they’d never be alone in losing their account or the service being offline for them
Fediverse drama being what it is, though, that'd probably involve the dev in all sorts of arguments and debates he'd rather not touch with a ten foot pole