You don’t need to join lemmy.world. Just a heads up.
For all new users: I’d recommend picking an instance that:
- Is geographically close to you first
- Has the same “moral compass” as you (ie if they allow NSFW content or are defederated from instances that has sensitive content)
- That isn’t hammered by too many new users
It’s not that hard to check out this info, usually after a day or two on Lemmy you’ll figure these things out.
I’ve seen this kind of advice for new users a lot… I think a lot of us new users (that have been around for a little while… since the reddit API changes) understand the idea. However, there is not really a user friendly place to go -from there-.
Googling “lemmy instances” for example, does not give you a lot of enlightening information. There seems, to a new user, to be a lot of homework involved in researching instances that may work well for their use cases.
That’s a big issue, because there are a lot of people who don’t want to necessarily do that homework and just want to start seeing memes or participating in communities for their hobbies. I fall into this camp which is why I am just chilling on lemmy.world.
The best thing for lemmy to diversify which instances users access the fediverse from, would be for someone to create some sort of instance selection tool, where new users can quickly and easily parse the information contained in your bullet points.
Great project idea. I hope someone takes it! For now there seems to https://lemmyverse.net/ available for the interested ones. (tho it’s not like instance “selector” you’ve mentioned)
There is this: https://join-lemmy.org/
https://join-lemmy.org/instances and https://lemmyverse.net/ are good starting points.
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
ljdawson should add this instead of lemmy.world
