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.

with as much users as possible

Wouldn’t this lead to the same problems lemmy.world is having?

I would recommend choosing based on interests, rules that align with you, proximity to where you live, stuff like that. Population is not a problem, you can still participate everywhere because of federation.

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.

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.

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

My three top criteria for picking an instance were:

1. Little to no defederation issues, in either direction.
2. Likely to stick around for the long term.
3. Relatively small.

I just went with sh.itjust.works cuz the name was good and they were into piracy. Sounded reasonable.

I’m the admin of mine. 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. I only intend to proactively defederate from fascist and troll instances, and NSFW to reduce legal drama.

A probably too long post about an entirely different way of viewing things:

I have accounts at… I guess about eight instances. I didn’t see any reason to pick one, so I just signed up for everything that looked interesting and promising.

I expected to eventually settle on one, but as it turns out, I actually like having multiple accounts. I have four that I rotate between at the moment. Oh, and with the same username on each, though I still haven’t decided if that’s a good idea or not.

First, I have a kbin account and multiple lemmy accounts. Even though lemmy has more users, I much prefer kbin just as far as the software goes - it’s just a better UI. And Ernest is awesome.

Beyond that though, each instance is a different experience, since the federated communities on each one are different, depending on what other instances they’re federated with and which communities from which instances people have subscribed to. And I’ve amplified that by having different sets ofvsubscriptions on dofferent instances.

Kbin.social has a good mix of content but without most of the botfarm instances. I like that. That’s where I do virtually all of my serious posting.

Lemmy.world (when it’s up) has a wide range of content, but too much of it, even not counting the bots, is too shallow IMO. It feels too much like Reddit for my tastes. It is the best one to check in on for the most popular topics though,vand it’s where I’m most likely to be subscribed to communities for memes, humor, drama, pictures - all that sort of junk.

Lemmy.one actually feels like what it is - an instance that demands that users behave themselves. It’s nice when I want to just unwind, because it’s already the case thatvproblematic instances are defederated, and I have a limited set of feel good subs there. I almost never post from there though, since I don’t trust myself to behave.

Lemmy.ninja is my favorite. It’s just little quirky little instance with terrific admins and an amusing aesthetic. It’s little though - 120 users last I heard. That shows in its all, which is fairly limited, presumably just because few people means few subscriptions so few federated communities. That’s fine though - it’s a selection that matches my interests fairly well. And ninjas are cool.

And I’m still on the lookout for a serious, scholarly sort of instance - somewhere that will be a comfortable home for subs to philosophy communities and the like.

Star Trek is cool

I initially went with Kbin and Beehaw since it was clear that kbin and lemmy were going to mostly diverge on key features from the start. At the time, Beehaw was getting a ton of traffic thanks to the join-lemmy homepage placing them at the top of the suggested instances list, so there was no real criteria that went into my choice other than that.

Eventually deleted my Beehaw account though, after the admins made it clear they were not prepared for the influx and were being rather dramatic about their defederation choices as a result. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and while I understand their stance was “safe place first, popular site second” it just didn’t vibe with what I expected from an open reddit alternative.

Moved to VLemmy after that, and we all know how that went, but my rationale was that it was a growing but moderately small instance.

Afterwards I made 2 new accounts: one on infosec.pub and the other on lemdro.id.

At this point I’m mostly sticking with the Lemdro.id account, since they seem to be offering some very friendly support via their matrix space, and they have some apparently unique changes to backend to make it a very fast and easy to scale instance.

My kbin.social and infosec.pub accounts are mostly just alts gathering dust as a result.

how about an instance that isn’t down like 20% of the time or whatever.

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.

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.

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