Unless I’m overlooking it, join-lemmy provides no essential info to choosing an instance. It doesn’t display uptime, location, number of users, age, or number of connected instances.
I used It and ended up on an instance that seemed to be missing many male** communities and was on the other side of the planet from me (though fortunately did not have too many other users). Then I followed a different instance browser and found a much better one for me.
EDIT: ** was supposed to say major communities, not male communities. But I’m leaving it because
Admins / instance owners can control what other instances and communities the local users have access to. And entire instances can be dropped automatically because of long response times.
This was one of the top instances recommended on join-lemmy, and it couldn’t find top communities from lemmyverse. Out of curiosity, I poked my head back to the instance a second ago, and I see users asking the server owner about it.
Maybe my experience is rare, but if the instance you choose is going to have a material effect on what instances and communities you can interact with, that’s essential info to choosing a home.
Which is a problem. The onboarding for the fediverse - especially choosing a lemmy instance if that is the direction you want - is way too obtuse right now. Instances are definitely not all equal, and the icon and description are the least useful data points to rely upon.
What’s your take on an optimal instance? I went first for lemmy.world, because I checked a federation map and seemed like a good choice. but it’s getting laggy with the influx, so I found a probably nearby server with cool local content, and only a handful of users. But from here subscription to other instances seems weird, often lemmy.world communities don’t show up in search even with their direct URL
Unless I’m overlooking it, join-lemmy provides no essential info to choosing an instance. It doesn’t display uptime, location, number of users, age, or number of connected instances.
I used It and ended up on an instance that seemed to be missing many male** communities and was on the other side of the planet from me (though fortunately did not have too many other users). Then I followed a different instance browser and found a much better one for me.
EDIT: ** was supposed to say major communities, not male communities. But I’m leaving it because
What do you mean by missing communities?
Searching for specific communities and they aren’t present on the server.
All communities exist across the fediverse, it doesn’t matter on which instance you personally are. Or am I missing something?
Admins / instance owners can control what other instances and communities the local users have access to. And entire instances can be dropped automatically because of long response times.
Yeah, defederation exists but that doesn’t (shouldn’t?) happen that often.
This was one of the top instances recommended on join-lemmy, and it couldn’t find top communities from lemmyverse. Out of curiosity, I poked my head back to the instance a second ago, and I see users asking the server owner about it.
Maybe my experience is rare, but if the instance you choose is going to have a material effect on what instances and communities you can interact with, that’s essential info to choosing a home.
I don’t think most people are going to take that second step though. Most people will look up the main website and choose something from there
Which is a problem. The onboarding for the fediverse - especially choosing a lemmy instance if that is the direction you want - is way too obtuse right now. Instances are definitely not all equal, and the icon and description are the least useful data points to rely upon.
What’s your take on an optimal instance? I went first for lemmy.world, because I checked a federation map and seemed like a good choice. but it’s getting laggy with the influx, so I found a probably nearby server with cool local content, and only a handful of users. But from here subscription to other instances seems weird, often lemmy.world communities don’t show up in search even with their direct URL
A funny feature is that I can’t post from the new instance because it would ask for the comment language which can’t be selected from wefwef
Beyond that, I personally don’t care.