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How do you choose an instance and does that have a significant effect on your Lemmy experience?
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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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smaller instances give you more control over your feed generally but discovery is on you.
i do expect better filters and controls in the future
Would a smaller instance not be more likely to have weaker support, or more prone to shutting down and taking you with it?
that all depends on the instance. small does not mean it will go away. for example my instance is topical. by design, even if it gets "popular" it has some in-built upper limits and if the mass grows beyond them it means I can likely get help paying for the next steps up.
just because an instance is big does not mean its necessarily safe or stable, first its imporant to note that large instances have scaling issues as the deployment for the system is not ready to scale that way, instead they need to deploy to every bigger servers in an inefficient manner or spend a ton of time rolling bespoke deploys. these big servers are just a few volunteers. some big instances are managed by 1-4 technical people, the same numbers a small instance has.
Also it costs money to run large scaled systems, you can run an instance for you and some friends for nearly free if you find a deal and only a few bucks a month if you dont.
So big instance/ small instance does not mean much with stability, they both have thier issues. Something to note, smaller instances are MUCH easier to run.
It feels like starting a new instance is the trendy thing to do, similar to creating some new crypto shitcoin a few years ago. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, but I would imagine more deeply rooted instances would generally offer more support and be less likely to disappear.
haha no, instances like this pre-date centralized systems, e-cash and everything else. instead of something hip and new, you are doing something very old, like they way the internet was designed to operate old.
i was running sites like these a decade before reddit came to the fore. The thing that's "new and weird" is this desire to pile onto a single domain handing control of your feed, personal information and more to a billionaire. If you are into wealth gospel i get it, though they haven't done as much to earn trust as people seem to think.
AOL and Compuserve went under for all the same reasons the majors are struggling now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm onboard with these decentralized platforms. I'm not questioning the value of this federation system, but the potential volatility of parts of it. The concept of an ''instance' may be old, but that seems to be a new buzzword, fit for abuse.
it already has been abused, you came here a bit late and missed the fireworks, there was a massive expulsion of badly behaving instances by many of the instances wanting to remain connected. I was actually quite surprised and impressed at the speed at which admins collectively decided and acted across the network. I actually suspect the ratio of mods:users to be higher here. The ratio of admins:users def is.
They might have smaller supports, but they are much less likely to be targets of ddos attacks and bots.
Mine is very prone to this because I'm running it myself and I'm a dumbass
I don't know, man. I think you could run the fediverse if you put your mind to it.
So far I've managed to
Generally, yes, though technically it can happen to any instance with a small or single-person admin team. If an instance has multiple admins it is far less likely that it will one day just die.
I do feel like looking for a small instance is better from what I've read so far, but this is the first time I've heard control over my feed being different by instance, outside of instances defederating.
I chose sh.itjust.works but since then I’ve realized that it would be better to support instances that are local to me so I think I’ll move to an Australian instance. Supporting local instances might help with regional growth
https://aussie.zone/
This is the one I’m thinking of switching to
its more that with more existing users its more likely any particular community will have already been pulled into that instance by someone else already.
I run my own instance so there's nothing on my all feed outside of communities I already sub to because there are no others on my instance.
As a reminder, instances only get content from a community when someone on that instance is subscribed to it ( so to get it in in the first place they'd search !community@instance then subscribe to it).
Control is maybe the wrong term.
If you choose an instance that vaguely aligns with your interests then your local feed will be more interesting.