What made you choose your instance?

I'm the admin :P

Irreverent commentary, staunchly pro LGBT community, correct opinions

Come for the dirt bag leftism, stay for the aggressive anti-bigotry initiatives and correct takes.

I was on lemmygrad at first but then they banned me for being a liberal so now I'm on hexbear

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I'm the admin of mine and also like books and writing

Im a communist

I’ve been on Hexbear the entire time. It’s inclusive, yet has zero tolerance for reactionary attitudes.

Also since federation we actually have been complaining the quality of posts we see have gone down. You all lack an energy that made r/cth and hexbear such a breath of fresh air.

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I started with Lemmy.world but then moved to Lemmy.nz because it was faster.

i joined chacha as a lifeboat years ago when the CTH reddit got banned and stayed as it became Ursus hexagonalis. the lack of ads, the memes, irreverence for institutions combined with respect for humans, and the absolute god-tier emoji selection is what keeps me here.

also, the megathread topics are very interesting/informative as a People's History, since many of the stories come from the "periphery" for all my world systems nerds out there. living in the imperial core, the constant cacophony of cultural outputs and hegemonic discourses, i appreciate any channel that connects me with post-colonial narratives, critical theory, etc.

Been here on Chapo chat, now hexbear since the beginning. Joined before federation was even a thing. Only instance with mandatory pronouns, one of a few with good political takes.

I followed the Daystrom Institute community from reddit to startrek.website.

Piracy 🏴‍☠️

I still remember the sub

moved there from lemmy.world because of downtime and also unclear, sloppy defederation policies. i've never seen a clear explanation why it took a month to defederate exploding heads (allowing their userbase to grow 3x) and week for rammy site, but hexbear gets defederated "preemptively". ???

also now i see beehaw content which is something i didn't expected, but it's cool

Beehaw cuz I heard they had strong moderation and don't shy away from defederation. Also bees.

I was on r/chapotraphouse before we got banned from Reddit. I joined chapo.chat after it was made by old r/cth users, and chacha became hexbear.net like maybe a year later.

I’ve just been here since CTH got binned.

I have no plans to look anywhere else. I think federation is a fad, and I won’t participate elsewhere.

I just showed up one day. I'm pretty sure these fuckers kidnapped and brainwashed me into their weird cult.

Honestly, I liked that they followed electoral politics, helping me fulfill my sick, taboo desires.

The shark, mostly.

Also because I'm on their Calckey instance too.

And this:

Shit just works. Except when it goes down. But mostly. Still, the name is fire.

I'd rather comrades than liberals where my home instance is concerned; but I didn't have a temperature gauge for what hexbear posted like. Might make a hexbear alt in case something happens to the grad, tho; they're good folks so far.

There's an instance for my country so I just joined that one.

Because it has a tank logo

Started on kbin.social and beehaw.org. Realized I liked Lemmy just a little more early on and stuck with Beehaw. But then they started to defederate from larger instances with open signups. So I joined lemmy.world to be part of the bigger picture. Then it got too big and people want to play the DDoS game, so now I've got this alt on lemm.ee as well. We'll see where it goes from here. 😂

I joined Lemmygrad because I came from GenZedong, and stayed there

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It's the most based one.

The server is hosted in my country, the TLD belongs to my country and the current admins seem chill and dedicated to make it work. Hopefully that's the recipe to it's longevity.

Once they add some donation method I'll gladly donate and if they need help I'll gladly offer my technical knowledge.

I'm Canadian eh

I'm a scientist so I joined the instance that seemed to match my interests the best. I like browsing Local and seeing all the other science posts as well

Because only lemmy.ml was popular 2 years ago.

I saw blahaj and I was sold

I was born in it, Molded by it

I hate America

I mean I joined it 3 years ago because I followed r/cth from reddit and for a while it was pretty much the only active instance

Putin pays me to post there

I'm the admin. Why? Because I enjoy doing, it's in the spirit of decentralisation, and I didn't want to risk being part of an instance that defederates from leftist instances like Lemmygrad or Hexbear.

German Feddit thats it

I started on Beehaw but created a second account on lemmy.world since I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any content. Once the slowdowns started I took a deeper dive into different instances and saw there was one centered around music and production and this would fit me best. I still use all three but I still think this will be home for me.

I built my own 😁

When the reddit went bad I started looking for anti-corporate communities that would migrate.

r/cyberpunk was the first place I checked, but there was no discussion about migrating at all there. r/selfhosted was another obvious idea but people there seemed very reluctant as well.

The only sub that pointed to some clear migration path was r/piracy. I really appreciate the integrity of dbzer0 in this situation.

I didn't want to have my stuff out of my control so I made my own instance.

IDK I just kinda ended up here. The domain is easy to memorize, I guess.

(Edit: And it never goes down cause no one uses it.)

I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn't make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

But I'm still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.

Karl Barx

Found some power tripping mods in some instances, lemmy.ml seems fairly neutral.

Yarr 🏴‍☠️

I like science and Mander has a lot of neat science communities. I also keep a back up account for Lemmy.world.

I started out on Lemmy.world because it seemed like it was going to be home to the most communities, and people seemed to like & respect the admin.

But I also work on software, and I’m here for all the computer nerd shit Lemmy has to offer. Plus World has had uptime issues. So programming.dev seemed like a good home instance to try out, even if I’m interacting with a bunch of communities on World too.

I missread beehaw as yeehaw, was only slightly dissapointed when I noticed.

I was told, by someone I know in a local Discord, that it was a reddit replacement for Midwest leftists. At the time I didn't know what Lemmy was. Now that I'm using it in place of reddit, it's performing very well. I like our local instance a lot. I am tempted to move to Startrek.website though, just because I'm a huge nerd

I didn't pick one.

I spread that shit out over a bunch of instances.

Decentralized myself lol. There's no need to think of lemmy in terms of a single home. You can do that, but I prefer to think of it as a bunch of crash pads. Bounce between them as needed, maintain the accounts, and even if one homie can't put you up for the night, another one can.

I just made my own... I buy domains like steam games, never to be used/played, so finding a use for one is fun

I like planes

I first joined Lemmy.ml and beehaw because when I joined those were pretty much the only active English language instances. I moved to lemmy.ca because Lemmy.ml started going down more when redditors showed up, and I didn't like beehaw's "defederate now and sort it out later" attitude. Plus I figured going with a mid sized instance is best. They aren't going to get overloaded because they are too big, and aren't going to shut down due to lack of interest either.

I was initially on lemmy.world, but the frequent DDOS attacks and the fact that Hexbear and Beehaw had defederated from it really put me off. Also, communities like !linux and !privacy were much bigger on lemmy.ml compared to lemmy.world.

Soo I jumped ship to lemmy.ml

Trans rights! Also, shonk 🏳️‍⚧️🦈

I chose Lemmy World simply because it was there. It was literally the first one that popped up and I had no clue how Lemmy worked so I chose that one.

the chapochatters pulled me back in

The reddit piracy thread moved to lemmy.ml.

Was on r/cth, was on the lifeboat discord which wasn't functional for me, migrated to chapo chat which was instantly the largest lemmy instance by a couple of orders of magnitude in terms of posts per day and active users. Not been too outgoing in this space, sometimes I go to lemmygrad or lemmy.ml if I run out of content.

I joined sh.itjustworks because of the fact that it's powered by renewable energy and it's bilingual with French and English. As someone who wants to stop climate change and someone who is learning French, it made the most sense for me to join this instance. I have no alts, but if I were to make one it would probably be on lemmy.world, blajah.zone, or dbzer0.

I'm running my own instance, which made it easy to choose which instance to use 😁

It was suggested by the sign up process at the top of which domain I should join. I don't remember how, it's already a blur, but afterwards I saw people saying the registration process needed to add a way of directing users to smaller instances as a thing to lighten the load and stop everyone going to lemmy.world and it confused me because that's literally what happened to me.

Anyway I also noticed it had a steam deck community and that was good enough for me.

I made this account a long time ago, the landscape was different. The three biggest (federated) instances were this, lemmygrad.ml and Wolfballs (alt-right, run by a right-libertarian but dominated by shameless racists and neo-nazis, most instances defederated from them).

Since Lemmygrad was often preemptively defederated from other instances, I wanted a stable well-connected instance that wouldn't die after a few months (learned that lesson the hard way on PeerTube) and am a socialist tech-expert. So the choice was simple. No regrets, and I wouldn't change it now.

I did have an alt on the former GTIO instance (civil debate only, no political-oriented bans) because I did want to see the garbage being posted by Wolfballs losers on there and practice deconstructing the flaws and refuting. I also had an alt on an instance that wasn't federated at the time. They were all appropriate choices given the landscape then and now, and I've had the foresight and fortune to almost never have an instance I use block one I wish to interact with. But unfortunately many so-called general instances have made dubious defederation choices which do make me worry that I may need to start making alts just to continue interacting with some communities in the future.

Kept having stability issues with the instances I joined. One of them even dissapeared completely (rip vlemmy). I ended up on a anarchy/piracy one and it's been the best experience so far.

lemmy.ca because it's Canadian.

It's also a smaller instance, and I wanted to avoid joining a monolithic instance like world or beehaw, in favour of a smaller community I can feel a part of.

... But primarily because it's Canadian honestly.

It was a battle between my queer identity and my biologist identity. For regular browsing and posting, science won out. But I have an account with blajah.zone too to discuss the queer agenda.

Midwest.social because I live in wisconsin

Was looking for a Furry server and yiffit was too funny for me not to join

It's funny, I created kind of a the same thread in !fediverse@lemmy.ml a few minutes ago

I sometimes like programming

"my day won't be ruined if I see a tit."

This is glorious :-)

well i tried to join programming.dev because i'm a developer and i figured devs would run a fast server, but I didn't get the email they said I'd get when my account was approved. By the time I worked out the account was active anyway, I'd created an account on a geographical server and it's fast as with zero downtime so I'm sticking with it. Set up a monthly donation to keep it running and I'm super happy with it, the admin seems cool.

Im french (and i like smaller instances that just work) We're a small community grouped around a few local sublemmies and i really like it that way

Thought the domain was funny and the owner is a pretty cool person that be let me start a community

There was simply no acceptable alternative the moment I saw someone else from this instance and found out it was an option

I chose lemmy.world for my main account, mostly for the name. Just sounds like a central place to be. I've bailed on one instance on account of them dragging their feet on defederating from exploding heads.

I'm a M-L and I love memes. Hexbear would be a close #2. Lol

I started on Lemmy World, because I could. I didn’t truly get the decentralized nature of the Fediverse, so I went with a larger instance thinking that was best for longevity.

Now that I understand how things work, I’ve picked up a few more accounts/instances (including one on Kbin) as backups and currently use Lemm.ee as my main account.

Ultimately, I would like to start my own instance for me and my family.

For me the choice was easy: I was already into the fediverse thanks to Mastodon and then (before all the reddit api drama) some lovely people I had already heard about decided to spin up a general purpose Italian Lemmy instance, and so far I couldn't be happier for my experience here.

Maybe I was just lucky but what I would suggest is try to see if there is a small/medium sized instance of your university/city/country as I think they are the ones that works our best (not just for Lemmy but for the fediverse in general)

They don't want to defederate from any other instance so I can decide if I don't want to view anything.

I picked my instance because it wasn't too big or too small, and it federates with basically everyone.

I was on lemmy.world at first but it's constantly down so I started searching for a new instance. I fell in love with the lemmy.zip color theme.

gotta stand with fellow code monkeys

I vape nicotine (former smoker) and I smoke weed. Not as much as I used to, but I had difficulty finding an instance with personal interest, so the one I am on seemed good.

I was on world but people are assholes and kept ddos-ing it and heard lemm.ee was pretty good. Can confirm lemm.ee is pretty good. Bonus: beehaw doesn't defederate lemm.ee and their communities are pretty cool.

I'm on Kbin.social because it was being recommended a lot when all the Reddit stuff was happening and there weren't any hoops to jump through when signing up.

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I made it.

I have joined several instances and all have their pros and cons, but I'll plug the most recent one (lemmings.world) because it checked all of these boxes for me:

• Federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org
• Not federated with certain more problematic instances
• Stable/good uptime record
• Upvotes/downvotes, community creation and image uploads enabled
• I liked the name

I joined Beehaw first because I like their philosophy, the admins seem pretty level headed, and they're decently large. But they defederated from/were never federated with a couple of instances that I was interested in, so I made my own instance and am here now.

I joined lemmy.world because it was the biggest.

Defederation didn't seem to be an issue at first, though I would like to know what exactly I'm missing out on (within reason... Not a fan of bigotry) But the performance issues are making me wonder if I should switch.

EDIT: I do kind of want to be on an instance that federates with both lemmy.world and beehaw. Any recommendations?

By selecting something from the top of the list at the time, I ended up on vlemmy.net. Then that went down after a few days. So I created an account on lemmy.world. With that instance, everything seemed buggy, and I was constantly logged out and unable to load my account.

So I made an account ln whatever I'm on now.

To me, this seems like a big drawback for lemmy. Creating an account doesn't guarantee any persistence unless you host your own instance. So the bar is not low for new users.

OwO

Because Canada, woo! My definitely not picked on a whim choice has yet to fail me though, I haven't personally experienced any downtime or slowdowns and I like the community overall.

I have to admit - I have no idea what and how I came here - but I like what I see.

That's how.

furry

Learned about it when they banned chapo. The chapo fork wasn't a good fit for me. Mostly hang out on twitter and use this to post articles or look for longer discussion

I wanted to go local and the closest instances were either Finnish or Danish and I went Finnish because I'd rather not accidentally order ten litres of milk every time I try to say something

Also this is where the fountain pen community originally was. They've since moved to wayfarer but honestly? I kinda like it here. Small instance and it's name isn't just Lemmy.somethingrather like most places are. I do one day want to host my own instance though, so I can have the pride of adding yet another thing to my domain's umbrella.

I’m just a sh.ithead.

Seriously though, the community is awesome, love the name, and TheDude abides.

Started at Lemmy.world. Also made an account on Kbin.social. And Mastodon.social. Just checking out what the Fediverse was all about. Now I’m on Artemis.camp as a beta tester for the Artemis App and loving it!

It was nearby.

It depends on the instance - I have multiple accounts.

Kbin.social because I like the kbin software better than the lemmy software, and because Ernest is awesome.

Lemmy.world because it's definitive (when it's up).

Lemmy.one because it requires people to not be assholes.

Lemmy.ninja because the admins somehow manage to be both diligent and goofy, and because ninjas are cool.

Honestly picked it just for the name alone. Scrolled through a giant list and was the first to give me a good chuckle.

I made it. I like retro games. That's it.

I chose my current one because it offered Alexandrite as a front-end, and I didn't realise I could've just gone to alexandrite.app and used it for my old instance ('cos I'm stoopid).

vlemmy.net went away and lemmy.world seemed pretty active so here we are. I'm also set up on sh.itjust.works because I love the name of it.

Originally started out on Beehaw due to the name. I like bees. I like cowboys. Win-win. Then they defederated from the two biggest instances, and I lost out on a lot of great communities.

Ended up switching to Reddthat since the name / URL was easy for my ADHD brain to remember and didn’t require typing a novel to join.

No email requirement

i started with lemmy.one, but then started up my own instance. It just feels good to diy.

Because I'm a developer and programmerHumor was my goto sub.

lemmy.world kept going down every other hour and I figured being a software engineer this instance made the most sense.

Made my own for myself and some friends. We couldn't be bothered creating account on the larger instances and have power tripping admins de-federating instances over trivial issues.

I have a similar story where I originally went with FMHY up until it went down. I decided to go with dbzer0 because they have a similar stance for discussing piracy.

That said, as far as I know, they have the same rule as /r/piracy when it comes to requesting or linking to content which I don't personally like. I enjoyed helping people find music and TV shows on FMHY. They also want to keep things SFW which I don't personally have strong feelings about one way or the other but I'd prefer an instance with an indifferent approach.

How could I not choose this one??

Also they were updated to the version that didn't have that "all the posts in a sub suddenly show up and push what you were looking at down off your screen" bug

It was one of the suggested ones on Memmy and the description seemed reddit-like so I picked it.

I live in Canada.

I'm located in Canada so I picked between the local ones. I spent a lot of my time looking at subs for my city/province/school/Canada, so it seemed like a good call. I also liked going to places like bapcsalesCanada because I could actually make use of the information, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

It's also nice to have some influence over where my data is stored and the laws around it.

I'm on slrpnk.net

I wanted originally to join one of the big ones, but figured that I should distribute the load by going for a smaller instance. I was scrolling through a list of instances and saw the logo and the name. I was already vaguely familiar with solarpunk, so I chose it because it appeals to me (environmental awareness, anarchism, optimism, DIY, upcycling, pragmatism and so on). To be completely honest, I had no idea what "choosing a home instance" entailed at the time.

Pretty happy with the decision though, it's a themed instance so locally I get stuff you'd expect, and when browsing all I mostly see stuff from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml and the rest.

Not a particularly interesting story, but nevertheless here it is.

I was on lemmy.world. It has some power tripping admins and also most of the time it is under attack. So I switched to the current one and it is fine and fast and stable most of the time.

I'm on lemmy.world.

I joined while lemmy.ml was still the biggest instance. While I was picking an instance, I read that people should consider joining the smaller instances instead of lemmy.ml. I think the idea was to promote horizontal growth across lemmy instead of vertical growth on one instance. I picked lemmy.world because I liked the instance admin running it, and I wanted to help spread out the user base.

Didn't realize that lemmy.world would quickly become the biggest instance and encounter all the growing pains of rapid growth, but I still stick with this instance to be a part of identifying what those growing pains are so they can hopefully be fixed and grow Lemmy into a more mature platform that is capable of scaling up.

I didn't know any better.

An overwhelming desire to never be taken seriously by the average user.

couldn't join lemmy.world and i had a blahaj

Unix-flavor.

Picked one with a funny name and the admin seemed quite relaxed but it appears to have gone offline permanently.

ich_iel

I'm a dev that likes to dabble in new things all the time and I have a pretty varied skillset that includes some DevOps chops. When I left Reddit and deleted my accounts after ~18 years being there, I wanted to be a real contributor to the Fediverse and not just a lurker or commenter. I continually got laughs out of the stories about orcas capsizing yachts, and thus the URL for my instance was born (I wanted it to be more playful and tongue-in-cheek, hence the "enjoying" part).

Looked for communists, found communists, stayed for communism.

Well, I created the instance I'm on so it seemed like a logical choice!

I created it primarily because I am a fan of self-hosting stuff, and I also figured it would be a cool way for me to contribute to the Fediverse - even if its not really that large.

shonk

Our community always cared a lot about decentralization, so naturally we had to have our own instance, even before the reddit api exodus. It only made sense to use the instance of the community I vibe with. Besides this, we offer:

• closed signup to limit bot account creation, you need either manual verification or a signup fee for anonymous users
• high performance instance which is entirely community funded with the signup fees + anonymous donations
• unlimited access to the fediverse, there's no de-federation unless required by law

The first one was beehaw, idk how I got there, but after a day I realised they have shit policy to prevent me reading things and only allow to read what they decide. Never visited again.

...I made it xD

I initially chose vlemmy.net because it seemed big enough but not too big, and didn’t de/federate for non legal reasons (I can choose what I want to see myself).

Unfortunately it went down, so I moved to lemm.ee which seemed pretty similar but bigger so hopefully it will stick around longer.

at first I saw these strange domain names and didn't really know how Lemmy works...

I saw lemmy.world, it has thr "world" ending so I was like, okay, this is a worldwide instance, this is what I need.

I was wrong, now I know, but I like World.

I'm on feddit.it because it's an Italian-speaking instance, so I can read local posts from all kinds of subjects in my own language

I chose lemmy.world because it felt the most neutral and least controversial. I also feel like there's enough "backing" behind it and feel semi-confident that it'll stick around.

The coolest name.

I joined lemmy.ml because 1 year ago (yes I'm old I know) it was the biggest and most active instance, also it was, very importantly, the most federated with others I believe, the other candidate was lemmygrad but I feared (and that fear came true) fediblocks and defederations

thought this domain looked cool

Was looking for a smaller kbin instance to help out with decentralization, saw an ad for kbin.cafe and signed up