Along similar lines, I’d like to offer a relatively easy and “organic” approach for Lemmy-ings that want to help the fediverse grow, but aren’t ready to cold turkey quit Reddit’s admittedly still larger pool of posts and comments:
Suggested approach to switching with minimal pain: ** Read-Only on Reddit, Read-Write on Kbin & Lemmy **
Reddit was made by all/many of us (with special nod to mods). Reddit wants to be a media company instead of a community? Fine: switch to consumption only.
This is a LOT easier an approach to follow than principled “I’m only reading Lemmy even if it really doesn’t have the community/posts that I miss” approaches, and in the long term it should still result in a transition of interesting thoughts, memes, etc moving to Lemmy.
OP here: IMO choosing an instance is mostly a big decision about nothing. What I mean is its an annoying barrier of a decision you gotta make to play that’s both cheap to change AND probably will have very little impact on your experience.
In two weeks you probably won’t care which instance you picked. 90% of instances are going to be relatively generic: same posts, same communities, same federation.
If for some reason you do regret your first pick in a couple weeks, you’ll know, and you probably won’t feel like its a big deal to switch. There’s no karma, and losing your account’s link to a couple weeks of post/comment history is, at least to me, a little 🤷♀️.
My advice would be: pick any semi generic instance to start (e.g. lemmy.world), and if you’re curious about more curated instances (there’s a lot less of these, most notable is beehaw.org) make an account on them a few days later just to check out the vibe.
The only wrong decision is to waffle lol.