Rules. Community feel. Performance. Geographic location. Just off the top of my head.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Thanks, so for example I see you've signed up in an AUS instance, would you have other accounts somewhere else or use this one in different instances?
I do have accounts on other instances, but thats really just for if my main one is offline for some reason. I use this one to sub and participate, no matter which instance the community is hosted on. ie the one we're on right now is homed to lemmy.ml
You don't, that's the beauty of federation, you can pick whichever instance you want and interact with everyone!
The actual reasons to pick an instance are just rules/moderation and ping/bandwidth, really.
Some instances let you create communities, others don't, for example.
"The server I registered with might go down" was the reason I made my own instance instead of joining a public one. It was easy, and now I only have to trust myself that the server will stay online, and that the server is up to date and built from the GitHub source without modifications.
Right now, if lemmy.ml goes down, anyone who used that as their "home server" won't be able to log in or interact with Lemmy. So, one factor you might want to think about when joining an instance (or running your own) is, "What's their uptime like?"
In a few days, and then on July 1st, we'll also get to ask, "How well did ___ handle the Reddit exodus?"
Also new to Lemmy, but it looks like it only really matters which instance you register with if the instance shuts down (your account will be lost).
You should also try to pick a smaller instance, to avoid unneccessary load on the few 'main' ones, but also make sure you're on a reliable instance, since you'll lose access to Lemmy in downtime.
Also, when communicating with other instances, they can see the one you signed up to (I'm on sh.itjust.works).
Load distribution. Different Lemmy instances are run by different volunteers who can only put so much money into them. So if lots of volunteers put up their own instances, then ideally each instance could have a few users signed up and thanks to federation, they'll all be interconnected.
Thanks, interesting point. I guess if the load is distributed enough, we won't have Lemmy devs asking for donations to keep the servers running under bigger and bigger loads ๐๐ผ
Another interesting thing I realised: In a centralised network like Reddit, if the site goes down, nothing is accessible. But if a Lemmy instance goes down, most, if not all communities you're subbed to should still be up given they aren't hosted in that instance.
It depends of where the communities you're subbed to are hosted. Like currently a lot of communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. If it goes down a lot of communities will still be unavailable but you can still browse the rest.
You can't create communities on other instances seems to be the main difference. Also you could lose access to your account if your instance goes down
Thanks, it also looks like if I want to sub to a community on a different instance, I have to search for it from my own instance, as I can't hit "subscribe" in the community list on another instance. Regarding losing access to your account, do people keep multiple accounts to avoid this? No idea how likely instances are to go down.
that's due to the way information is populated, while your instance can see the content, it doesn't actually know its there until you search for it which populates that data (in simple terms anyway)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's as if instances are countries and communities are cities. A state gets connected to a city of another state when someone decides to drive there (search it). When someone does that, it creates a street that both states can take (and so posts and comments from that community automatically get to the other instance).
Am I getting this right?
it basically comes down to personal preference tbh, each instance have slightly different rule sets and internal communities, lemmy.ml / lemmy.world are simply some of the 'main' instances, They're higher on the list on the instance search and thus generally gather a larger crowd because people see the higher user count and just go with that.
and if you don't like any of the public instances you can simply roll your own and use it as an internal friends chat that can also browse the external fediverse
Trust in admin(s).
You're trusting the person running your instance to do a good job, to provide good hardware and keep it running, to ensure it isn't de-federated from other instances, to provide Lemmy software updates, to not ban you or vanish one day.
Really, I don't know who my admins are, I've read a few posts and they seem pretty good, but I've not seen them before. But really, this is what it will come down to in the long run.
Haven't seen anyone mention this but some instances are themed around a topic or a country, with all their communities on that theme. So if you want your local feed to be on that theme, they'd be a good choice.
Most instances are general though, so local is full of a bit of everything.
Yeah I guess that's what I'm struggling with, say for example I'm into baking and there's a baking community here on .world, but maybe there's another one on .ml and wait here's a good one on .ca or something. So I'll be subscribing to three different baking communities in three different instances, it seems a bit redundant/divisive? But maybe it's just because it's early days, and with time the "best" communities will conglomerate and people will know the "best" baking community is on the .ml instances, but the best cooking one is on .world, etc, instead of subscribing to multiples of the same.
I guess if you like to actually visit each community and look at their latest threads from there it could be an issue, this is presumably what the feature request for "multi-communities" is all about where in theory we could group them all together for our viewing pleasure.
I do think certain communities will become the "main" ones for each topic though over time, we just have to try and make sure they're spread around and not all just on lemmy.ml.
There's a similar thing going on with gamedev communities, I'm subbed to at least 4 or 5 at this point. But in reality nobody was posting much to any so I just picked one at random to post in and kickstarted some convos, now it's the only one that seems to see any action. But since I'm subbed to all of them, if one of the others does suddenly kick off, I'll see it in my feed anyway and won't miss out so having four of them doesn't really seem like an issue.
I don't think I'll be visiting each community to look at each thread, but in my experience on Reddit, once you're subscribed to a certain number of communities you won't be able to see them all in your feed, so that's why I wonder :) Though I guess Reddit has some kind of interest algorithm to show you stuff, as I noticed that if I visited a subreddit directly it would then start coming up in my feed more often - I wonder if Lemmy would have the same kind of thing - the more you interact with a community the more likely it is to come up on your subscribed feed.
Yeah the current sorting options aren't ideal for surfacing posts in small communities if you're also subbed to large ones, but I've seen a few threads with the devs and contributors talking about better ways to handle that so fingers crossed someone comes up with something clever ๐ค
I'm also new, but I found it easier to subscribe to a community in your local instance. Just click the subscribe button. The only way I've found to subscribe to a community in another instance is to fiddle with the URL which is annoying if I want to subscribe to a hundred exyernal communities.
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