Hello everyone,
Based on the recent instability of Lemmy.world, a lot of people have been wondering whether they should move to another instance.
I used to look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and recommend people to pick a generalist instance with as much users as possible (using the 1m column), usually
- lemm.ee
- sh.itjust.works
- sopuli.xyz
- lemmy.one
- reddthat.com
- etc.
Of course, there are also the regional options
And of course, the thematic instances
- programming.dev
- lemmy.blahaj.zone
- discuss.tchncs.de
- lemmy.dbzer0.com
- etc.
I used to recommend the most populated instances, as we know that All depends on users subscribed from the instance.
However, now with the introduction of the Lemmy Community Seeder (https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs), which
tells your instance to pull the top communities and the communities with the top posts from your favorite instances
do you think this should still apply? I have seen promising instances (high uptime, already on 18.4 that was released today)
- discuss.online
- lemmy.ninja
- unilem.org
- etc.
Would you recommend users to join those as well, assuming that the admins use the LCS to populate the All feed? Most of us remember the Vlemmy.net disappearance, and it’s difficult to tell users to join small instances based on good faith, but at the same time, every instance needs to start somewhere, and they should be given a chance.
What do you think?
High on my list of important attributes is an instance that specifically does not defederate from others. If I see something I don’t want to see anymore I just block it myself. But I’d rather be treated like an adult capable of making my own decisions about what to see and read. If you’re also looking for this I suggest unilem.
AFAIK you can’t block an instance from your account. I.e. I like to keep tabs on the invasion of Ukraine, but one of the instances I used to use for that still federates with lemmygrad, so I would get russian propaganda in my feed from time to time. I would block that user, but there would always be another one eventually. I just don’t usually use that instance much any more.
I still want to know my enemies.
I still want to know my opponents.
Yeah it’s a pity - I hope the core Lemmy devs can find a way to facilitate personalised instance blocking, but I have a feeling that it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Sync for lemmy let’s you do this.
You can block instances with certain apps. Sync does it, I forget which others.
Not even the the instances that host outright hatred or drawn CP? Having that federate in is pretty bad.
No illegal content so definitely no CP. I believe that hate speech is banned of it meets the threshold of incitement to violence.
I like having an instance with local communities that match some of my interests. I also tried to find one a little more niche, but not so small as to be run out of someone’s closet. And of course, always donate to your home instance. Bandwidth doesn’t grow on trees!
On the privacy side, it was also important to me to have an instance that didn’t want my email address.
always donate to your home instance
Couldn’t agree more. I treat this as a rule across the fediverse. Hell I spend more time on various fedi platforms than I do playing video games, so I may as well put my money where my mouth is
Star Trek is cool
i went regional for a friendly region in my main language. It has a comunity for pudus which gives it extra points tbh. !pudu@feddit.cl if interested.
My three top criteria for picking an instance were:
- Little to no defederation issues, in either direction.
- Likely to stick around for the long term.
- Relatively small.
Yeah similar, especially the longevity
If I were to move instance for some reason, my primary concern would be that they aggressively and pro-actively moderate bigotry of all sorts, rather than "both sides"ing it
100%, I’m weary of instances with little to no defederations
Lol I love the duality of lemmy: the first top comment says “the least defederations, the better”, while the second top comment states the exact opposite.
I’m somewhere in-between. Defederation from obvious problematic instances (like lemmygrad, explodingheads etc.) is important, but there’s no need to overdo it.
Yeah. The reason why mine is so large is because it copies over from across the fediverse, not just in lemmy.
So…beehaw?
TBF, I have accounts at beehaw, world, and sopuli in addition to kbin. Each one has its own feel, and sometimes I’ll pull one up just based on my mood.
More than likely, yeah
I take the host my own instance path. It’s safer and more stable than relying on a third party.
I’ve just got one criteria: I host 😀
I went with lemmy.one because of privacyguides from reddit, and I liked that the move of actually being serious about the protest by making an alternative to move away from. Very few of the subreddits I subscribed to ever decided to make an instance or a fediverse community, so lemmy.one was what I defaulted to in the beginning. Since then Android has made an instance too, so that’d be my second choice. Anyways, that’s how I decided by going with what I was familiar with.
I’m new to it all so I registered on lemmy.world and subscribed to several communities. I also registered and subscribed to the same communities on lemmy.ee. When lemmy.world is down, I use lemmy.ee, but those subscribed communities that are local on lemmy.world are no longer accessible. I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessable. Is this not true?
Hello,
Thank you for your message. You might want to have a look at https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim to sync subs between accounts.
I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessable.
They are, but not in the way you think: if you follow community@lemmy.world from lemm.ee, and then lemmy.world goes down, you can still see the content of that community on lemm.ee, it does not become unavailable to you.
I hope this answers your question
I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?
This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.
Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn’t live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren’t cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.
When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won’t be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I’m not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).
Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn’t designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).
I might have some details wrong here. I’m more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.
I went with Feddit.uk as I am in the UK and it also helps give a more local spin to things because, increasingly, the English-language web seems to default to an American take on things and so going local helps counter that.
Plus uptime is good and the admin has said they will wield the defederation hammer sparingly.
General-purpose Lemmy instance. New users and communities welcome! Has upvoting and downvoting. Also, federated with most instances.
There’s also the niche hobby based instances. Such as the TTRPG, pathfinder, startrek, etc. (There’s also mine for books & writing…)
As a new lemmy user, I made an account on lemmy.world and programming.dev as I am a developer. Still trying to figure it all out but I think making my home base programming.dev since it’s I think it’s federated with most other instances and my all fees remains about the same. I mostly joined for the dev communities but also want to mix in some memes and general news so I can follow the goings on of the world
I advertised my instance in a different thread. It’s been almost exclusively a single-user instance, and I use both LCS and Lemmony to federate popular content. I’ve been exceedingly happy with it and don’t plan on going anywhere, so I figured I could handle a few extra users.
So if your criteria include:
- High uptime
- Federation with popular content
- Sensible rules
… feel free to check my instance out. Do note that so far, I’ve only defederated from exploding-heads (right-wing trolls) and threads (preemptively, of course).
I’ll probably cap registrations at 100 users or so, just to make sure my systems can handle the load, then see where things stand.
Interesting, thanks for sharing
What country is it hosted in?
The US.
No thanks.
Interesting username
