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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.
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
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
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).
A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what's missing is defederation policy.
Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you're on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I'm on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there's a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.
Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that's due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That's their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).
//edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will 'live' on your instance, and thus be under your instance's rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don't today intend to create any communities, it's good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.
Tbf, beehaw plans to refederate with lemmy.world once either the moderation tools for lemmy get better or lemmy.world makes it harder for trolls to just make a new lemmy.world account when banned from beehaw.
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.
Any instance, large or small, is only as good as the admin team running it. Ultimately, the larger instances have more content on their all feeds, are generally more stable, and are less likely to suddenly disappear. Smaller instances are generally faster, have more direct contact with their admins, and have more user control. Ultimately if you are having a good experience on lemmy.world you don't have a strong impetus to switch, but I would maintain alt accounts with your subscriptions just in case. You can use a tool called lasim to port them from one account to another. Though I am biased, if you do decide to move to a smaller instance, I have a brand new one called lemmy.thesanewriter.com that I am currently the sole admin of that is accepting new users.
What is the stance on federation? I'd love to find a place that doesn't federate with all the porn and politics instances.
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.
Yeah, since I've joined lemmy.world has been down quite a few times so I can see the problem of too many people jumping onto one instance. Just figuring out how to find out if a smaller instance is both reliable and stable as you say... Not sure what metrics I can look at or if such metrics exist
In my case I looked at the welcome post of my instance (lemm.ee) when it was still small and could tell it was definitely a good instance to choose.
My instance was opened by the mod team of the Brazilian subreddit, they do a great job moderating the subreddit so I trusted them when they called us to move over here. Local experience is cool because is in Portuguese and Brazil centered, so I have a good contrast with All that is almost exclusively in English and European/US centric.
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?
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.
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.
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 think a good strategy is to start on Lemmy.World until you discover a solid list of communities you want to follow. Then switch to a smaller instance that aligns with your interests and bring all your subscriptions with you.
If you start on a small instance you’ll have to do a lot more work to discover communities, since they mostly won’t appear in your All feed. Plus, you’re doing that small instance a favor by bringing interesting communities to their All feed.
Sounds like good advice, stick with what I'm on for now (lemmy.world) and see what smaller instances appeal to me as I explore. I'll probably end up doing this.
I'm also realizing from your post that the All feed is different from instance to instance? I thought it's basically everything from all federated Lemmy instances.
It is, but the content that is federated varies from instance to instance. Instances only federate communities that a user on that instance is subscribed to, so the all feed is a combination of posts from every community that an instance member is subscribed to. For a large instance like lemmy.world that's basically every community, but for medium instances there are various small communities they don't have and for a small instance, the all feed will reflect the interests of the founding members.
Yeah the All feed shows you the communities that you and all your instance-mates follow, but not every community in existence.
Thank you for asking this. I'm that student that had the same question but was afraid to ask.
Then I hope the answers are enlightening to us both! Takeaways so far are just choose a smaller instance and see if you can find one that specializes in your specific interests. But making sure it's an instance that will be well and reliably run is the part I can't figure out yet.
I like the name.
They did come up with a good one over at sh.itjust.works
Smaller instance is generally better. I've got a couple of seeder scripts automatically federating content in order to populate my All feed, which definitely helps the place feel less empty.
What does this mean, exactly. I'm still trying to figure this all out. I'm on kbin.social. I'm hearing all about Lemmy and fediverse. I see helpful pictures that people post of clouds with arrows, indicating that there are different servers, but I'm confused as fuck.
I can't figure out if there are two version of /r/politics, if someone else could have my username, or if I can see everything on every server, or how do I control what I see?
If anyone reads this, which I don't think anyone will, I am really looking for a Ukraine update page. That's the thing that made me log into reddit every day.
Yes, there are multiple people that could have your username, and you can have multiple accounts with the same username. For example, this is my third TheSaneWriter account on this platform, my first was on the defunct instance VLemmy and my second is partially active on the instance lemm.ee. Same with /c/politics, there can be as many versions of that community as there are instances, though the largest will probably be on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. Most Lemmy frontends have 3 feeds, Subscribed, Local, and All. Subscribed is only communities that you are subscribed to, you can subscribe to any community on any instance from any other instance as long as your instance hasn't defederated from them. Local is all of the communities on your instance, All is all of the communities that anyone on your instance has subscribed to. You can also block communities from any instance that you would like. Here's a fairly active Ukraine community, [email protected]. There are other ones out there, but this one is the most active. I found it here: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=ukraine. Lemmyverse can see any community on any instance that is public to the internet, so if you are ever looking for a community feel free to check there.
This is the best explanation of the difference between Subscribed, Local and All that I've run into so far. I thought I understood the All tab but apparently that was a huge misconception I had before asking this question.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
For anyone who lives outside of the US:
Choose an instance that corresponds to your country.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/
You could try here, it lists the uptime and geo location of plenty of fedi instances of all stripes. Take the uptimes with a grain of salt though, if they can't reach an instance for whatever reason it gets marked down even if it was actually fine, so it can read a bit low sometimes.
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.
Because it's FMHY 🏴☠️
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.