I originally chose to make my account on lemmy.world since all the content seemed to come from there. But I’ve since learned that I can fill my feed with stuff from any instance so it feels like it doesn’t actually matter if I’m on lemmy.world or not. At the same time, Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack so I’m wondering if I should change instance but have no idea what I should even be looking for when choosing.
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.
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.
there arn’t any sync problems currently. You’re posting just fine from kbin.social onto lemmy.world and it federated just fine onto my own tiny instance and so many others.
Is this why I don’t find anything when I search for Sousvide or dehydrating?
itl only search within communities at least one person on your instance is subbed to yes. and subbing doesn’t pull in hardly any previous posts, mostly just new ones from that point on
use something like this to help find communities, and perhaps retry searching on the home instance of a relevant community to search its entire history
So when I do this. It tells me to login via Lemmy.world ? I am on a smaller instance.
you dont need to login to search.
if you do find something you want to do more than simply view, copy the post or comment url, and then search for it on your home instance for it to be pulled over so you can properly interact with it
When you go into the community search on your instance, make sure you select All instead of Local. You’ll get results from all of the instances yours is federated with then.
The community catalogs people post will often take you straight to a different instance—which is different from the one you made your account on and logged into—which is why you see a login prompt.
Searching from your instance with All selected will let you visit communities from any instances yours is connected with while you stay logged in on your home instance. Hope that helps, I tried to simply but it’s late and I’m tired.
I think I know what the issue is. I’m using wefwef/voyager. I think the search there is making it hard for me to find things. I’ll try on the computer. Thank you
This is a good point for not choosing too small. I’ve made a couple of accounts, and it looks like when a servers crosses that 1,000 or 2,000 user mark you start getting much better consistency than the micro instances with only a few hundred users.
I usually find that I have to reload a few times if I’m the first person to try to subscribe to a community. That happens uncomfortably too often if the instance is small. Even then, it can take a days or possibly never to properly federate.
I’m sure these issues will be fixed, but for now, I’d like myself a small instance but not too small so as to avoid issues with consistency.
I go to the ones that everyone else defederates. Means they have something important to say. I’m against all censorship.
It depends on who is defederating from you. Extremists? You’re probably doing something right. Normal people? Maybe not so much.
Depends on your definition of “extremists” and “normal people”
Why is this garbage comment at the top, can I change my default comment sorting?
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.
Yeah the All feed shows you the communities that you and all your instance-mates follow, but not every community in existence.
All refers to everything that your instance knows about. Your instance only retrieves data for which users are actually subscribed.
All can be weird on small instances if the user subscriptions don’t have a nice distribution.
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.
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.
I basically did the same thing. Wrote a script to get a list of instances and how many instances they were federated with, blocked, and blocked by. Chose my instance based on those numbers after looking at a few of the top candidates.
You mean blocked instances right? AFAIK an instances “blocked users” is not published in aggregate. You’d have to comb through the modlog.
I don’t know there is a lemmy-stats-crawler utility that does it automatically and produces a json file. So all I do is parse that json file to get the numbers.
Ahh. I see. I took a look at the script. “Blocked Users,” is not reported by an instance, but rather It’s calculated by this script by looking at “Blocked Instances,” which is reported. How many active users each blocked instance has and then summing this together, the script shows “BU.” I was thinking it was an explicit list of users the instance blocked based on ban/block lists.
It’s a derivative, but still useful metric, I guess. BU could be high, but BI could be low and vice-versa.
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)
I chose my instance because of the admin (Stux). Basically, I knew that I could trust that it would be well run and have great moderation standards. It’s a small server for now and pretty sleepy. Most of my subscriptions are from lemmy.world and a few other larger servers but it doesn’t matter. I guess “local” might be less useful but that doesn’t bother me. I can say that, over the two weeks I’ve been here, I haven’t experienced any sort of performance issues or downtime.
The one case where I could see it being important is creating new communities – it’s probably more likely to have one take off on a larger server.
For me, if you are choosing a different instances for your alt account, always have a look at the instance’s server location info and their blocked list, just in case
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
More “portable” and secure identities would have been a good feature. The client could have handled most of the crypto required for signing and validating content. As it stands now, the instance Admin has complete control over your identity. Portable communities would follow that easily.
Most of the syncing issues are actually between the large instances or instances that having performance issues.
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.
I’ve got an alt on sopuli.xyz
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.
Because it’s FMHY 🏴☠️
I’ve jumped around a lot after paying attention to other folks’ instances and looking into ones that sound interesting in some way. As I’ve gotten more familiar with the fediverse concept and what’s out there, I’ve hopped instances. I’m not a heavy user, so it takes a little time, but I’m definitely a little bit more satisfied after every jump. I actually just moved to kbin.social tonight, but haven’t changed my login on this app yet. Swapped Mastodon servers, too, ended up at vmst.io. First one I actually found multiple things I was interested in following.
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.
