Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
Ok, but what if the instance I choose just ends suddenly?
Do I understand it correctly that on each one I have to create a new account and re-subscribe to all the communities etc,?
That's correct though account migration is planned for some point in the future, or at least noted as a desirable feature by the Devs. Maybe even linking accounts across instances?
Having to resubscribe to all your communities is annoying but I imagine third party apps could streamline that process when they get released/refined.
well this just happened with vlemmy.net, i was affected by this and had to manually resubscribe to 50 communities and recreate one, because of this someone made a tool to download your data off of lemmy and upload it to another instance https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Aside from what Coelacanth said, those instances are no more likely to shut down than lemmy.world (I can't recall a Lemmy instance that's not for personal use ever shutting down); they've functioned just fine for years and have even been upgraded for the surge of users too
Lemmy.fmhy.ml shutdown and hasnt come back yet. My understanding is that it won't be back, but that was the instance I signed up for initially to spread the server load
There is no 'main' website. It's all connected. People just started joining that because it's big and overloaded it, and now it's having federation and stability issues.
Federation means you can search for your community on your instance and it will fetch all the information if you want to subscribe. I am writing this comment with my account on feddit.de. I just switched to the „all“ feed, which shows all content from all servers feddit federated with. If I am looking up a new community to join like communityname@servername.tdl feddit will copy the posts for mento be able to interact with them. My reactions will be synched back.
Fair point. Tye small one’s Re being hugged to death and aren’t letting any more people in, so people are gravitating towards the juggernauts, and the juggernauts are collapsing under their weight. 
I started on lemmy.ml but it was unusable for the past few days. Today I managed to get into programming.dev pretty quickly and it has been smooth sailing.
When I applied, I never got a notification that it got approved, but I could post and comment on that instance. So you might have been in a similar situation as me or the admins are still dealing with a large influx of people
When I first joined, I never got a confirmation that my account had been accepted. After a few minutes, I just typed the username and password I used during registration and I was able to log in.
That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.
Everyone keeps saying to join the smaller instances, but the reason people aren't is because they are harder to find and usually have application gates thrown up. Because you can't apply through the app, and because I am on mobile, I don't even know how many Instances I applied for and then forgot what the instance was even called by the time they may or may not have approved.
All of this needs to be laid out better from the get-go. Even simply listing a server strain metric or warning (even if it's something admins set themselves) would be useful.
I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.
Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I'm really glad to be here.
All in all, they have some of the biggest communities for gay folks, Trans folks, and other minority groups. Lots of trolls from large open instances were shit posting lots of hateful crap in those communities.
The Lemmy’s mod tools are still kind of janky and they couldn’t keep pace with the toxic trolling, so they made the call to defederate from instances like Lemmy.world temporarily, until some new mod tools get built.
All the admins from the defederated instances get it and they all appear to be on the same page.
That said, users got pissed because beehaw has one of the best tech communities. So now people on Lemmy.world don’t have their posts / comments show up in those communities.
Basically, they had two shitty options, and they went with protecting the vulnerable minority.
Beehaw is a community that wants to create a specific type of experience for its users, it wants to create a safer space and has stricter rules.
I think it’s personally a non-issue that people get riled up about. They’ve temporarily defederated from lemmy.world because of the large spikes in new users and wanting to have the moderation tools necessary to handle that while keeping their community the way they want it.
There is a subset of new Lemmy users who think this experience needs to be Reddit 2.0, that it needs to be perfect and totally smooth for new users, or else it will fail?
Personally, I don’t agree. I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit at all. In the last month, I’ve found that I didn’t realize just how bad my Reddit experience had become. I’m okay with the experience being a little rough around the edges here and adjusting together. It has become obvious based on how good my interactions were here. How solid and interesting the content was. I’m not fiending for my specific subreddits, I’m good to move on and find new areas to focus on the internet.
I have a separate account for Beehaw, all the iOS apps already have way way better functionality than the Reddit official app, I can seamlessly switch between accounts. It’s been absolutely amazing to see how much this site and experience has evolved in one month. I’m super excited for the future here.
One thing I don’t miss is the "culture"… I hope this shift into the fediverse frees comment sections of the endless same dumb low effort puns, and even worse puns in the replies. Or fucking award speeches in comment edits, the same shitty jokes that nobody likes but somehow still perpetuate…
I'm late to the conversation. Yeah, that's what I hated about Reddit. I've been using it since 2009, and I noticed that it got progressively worse the moment they introduced karma.
Basically, due to the size and open registrations on some large instances, Beehaw admins decided to defederate because they didn’t have the manpower or systems in place to deal with the large volume of content.
Beehaw defederated from other instances as users were getting around bans by creating new accounts on those instances. The admins in question are talking about how to address this.
Lemmy isn't really set up for that. Its current structure is such doesn't allow for that, and developers are still trying to do more for new user verification.
This is something that larger websites spend a ton of money and developer time to fight, which is something Lemmy currently doesn't have.
They are overly sensitive special snowflakes that pipi their pampers if anybody that doesn't have 100% the same opinions as them is allowed to use the internet
It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for. Most of them talk to one another. For example. Lemmy.ml people can subscribe to and read Lemmy.world communities.
Lemmy can also talk to other “fediverse” social media platforms like Kbin. You often see a lot of Kbin users in Lemmy comments.
But why do I have separate profiles for each instance? Is it because I signed up in three instances? Is the only way to rectify this, to delete accounts?
The problem is that it uses WebSockets in a completely braindead way. There is absolutely zero reason to waste server resources on that for every single user. Of course it fails to scale..
...so create your community on that instance. Others will still be able to access it just like you're accessing communities elsewhere.
Some instances disallow community creation. That's the only part where this argument has any merit. Otherwise which instance a community is on doesn't really matter.
Technically it doesn't matter, but I expect communities will take off better in instances better suited to it. I doubt a gaming community on lemmy.ca will become the massive gaming community. I doubt c/Toronto will take off in a UK instance. Etc.