Depending on which instances are blocked you will see different content in ones or others. Which is why I choose instance based on the minimum number of blocked users based on the results of this script.

You’ll probably experience more performance issues if you choose larger instances. On the other hand, it’s harder to know how reliable and stable smaller instances are.

Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack

You’ve seen for yourself that it does have a significant effect. You may not want the largest instance because that paints a big target on you. You also need to pick an instance with admins you can trust, or at least reconcile yourself to jumping ship to another instance if they do the wrong thing.

I started on lemmy.ml about a year before the reddit exodus. It was fine, and I didn’t use it much because there wasn’t much activity. I started using Lemmy more heavily when everyone came over… but at the same time, performance at lemmy.ml became horrible. They also disabled community creation because “(they) have enough communities.” What does that even mean? I still haven’t created any communities, but I would like to be able to if I choose to.

I ended up jumping ship to another instance I’m happy with so far… but I almost went to vlemmy first, which no longer exists. That would have had an affect on my experience.

If I were evaluating an instance today, I would start by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see what version they’re on. Is it the latest? That means the admins are engaged at least enough to keep the software updated. If not, you should probably move on. Are they on a pre-release version? If so, are you comfortable with a little instability to have bleeding edge features and fixes? Then, I would just poke around a little to see how performance is on the instance before creating an account. Is it acceptable? Read the server sidebar. Are you OK with the rules? Last, I would find the support or “meta” community for the instance. See what kinds of discussions are happening there. Are the mods and admins active and are they philosophically aligned with you? Are problems being fixed? What are the big announcements? Does the way the server is being managed make sense to you?

Thank you for asking this. I’m that student that had the same question but was afraid to ask.

I started on Lemmy.world, but found mander.xyz as a backup. Mander.xyz is smaller and has interesting science and nature content on Local without lots of negativity. It also federates with a lot of subs (including both beehaw and Lemmy.world) so I can still see everything in All.

There are still a lot of syncing problems in Lemmy some outside posts show late or never show in other instances.I’m not worried about Lemmy.world despite all the attacks and issues they got. I think small instances are more chance to die than lemmy.world. If an instance die all the communities on it dies that’s not something I want to see especially if you are a mod on an community

I like the name.

I went with .world because I’m a reddit refugee and it was the easiest to find when I knew nothing about Lemmy

I now have a lemmy.ca account for when world gets ddos’d

I originally created a user on vlemmy.net. Then at some point that instance disappeared, causing me to lose the user, subscriptions and settings. So I created a user on lemmy.world. For whatever reason, it became very buggy - I don’t know if it’s the app (I’m using Jerboa) or the instance, but I got constantly logged out and loading posts didn’t work properly. Third time’s a charm (so far) as I created this user on lemm.ee.

The confidence of stability of different instances seems to be a huge detractor for me. I’m hoping to see lemm.ee run with decent stability going forward.

Go instance shopping. Yeah you’re creating accounts on instances you may not use, but creating an account for a test drive is acceptable I think. I tried five instances before I found one I liked. My runner up I use as a backup in case my primary goes down for some reason.

First I narrowed down candidates to those that are regionally close to me. You can sort instance location by going to https://the-federation.info/platform/73. Further down the page you’ll see a listing of all nodes (instances). You click on the location header to sort them by country.

Then you want to look at user numbers. Too big and the instance could have overload issues. Too small and the instance may not be well established and reliable. So medium on the user counts.

Then I did a “ping” on ones that looked good to see how they do on network response.

Once I found good candidates, I created an account on each and gave it a test drive. You can see who won for me.

I started on lemmy.ml, as I code a lot. I got a lemmy.world account when I found a lot of communities there I wanted to join and a lemmy.studio account for music communities. That was a few min before I learned how to subscribe cross-instance. (I couldn’t find the communities) I could clean up teh accounts, but nah, couldn’t think of a reason why.

Now lemmy.world is my main instance with lemmy.ml as 1st backup and lemmy.studio as special interest. (and I found a Dutch instance)

I joined lemmy.one because it presents itself as friendly to beginners/Reddit refugees. On the plus side, it’s worked very consistently and fast. They’re also federated with pretty much everything, so there’s plenty of content to choose from and narrow by subscribing and blocking.

On the minus side, you can’t create communities there and the only communities that exist are chat, meta, and some security and privacy focused communities. So you’ll have to get most of your content from across the ‘verce. (Which it part of the part of the point Lemmy anyway.) Also, as a beginner-friendly instance, there’s some tutorial-ish stickied messages depending on how I set my view settings.

The only significant disadvantage is if I ever want to create my own community, I need another account elsewhere. Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with my choice.

I like the instance policy here on world mostly, it’s open to all, and that the admins are reasonable with the rules and are quick to respond to issues.

I personally opted for kbin.social - I like the UI more, I like the community in the kbin-specific threads, and I like that I have the option to follow Mastodon users and interact with the whole micro-blogging side of the fediverse as well as using the “threadiverse” (Lemmy, etc). I think the occasional issues are bound to happen regardless of your instance, purely because it’s such a new and growing platform. kbin’s largely been rather stable, though.

The biggest downside for a lot of people is that kbin isn’t supported by most of the mobile apps yet. Personally, I don’t mind this - there’s a PWA (progressive web app - essentially just a fancy bookmark to the mobile site that keeps it in its own unique browser instance with the tabs, menus, etc, hidden so it looks like an app) that works really nicely. The mobile site is really nice to use in general, so I’ve no issues just using this until a killer app comes along.

With current synchronisation problem between instances, choosing a big instance is a no brainer. I don’t want to use small instance and got 404 when searching community on other instance or when not all comments from other instances showed up.