Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I’m learning more about the Fediverse, I’m seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.
Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.
Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I’ve found these links so far:
https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.
Beehaw.org places a high priority on censoring content that would offend folks like the LGBT crowd; they’ve been more-willing than most other lemmy instances to defederate from kbin or Lemmy instances that they consider sources of problem users. For some folks, that’s great, and for others, that’s not what they want.
It is currently a little hard to find the community rules for instances that give you at least a basic idea of what an instance is “about”. And not all instances are aiming for something, but for those that are, it’s nice to know about it. Sign up for pawb.social, and you’re on a furry-oriented instance, for example. For Lemmy instances, trying to join normally shows a page that talks a bit about the instance rules. For kbin instances, you can see a short writeup from the instance admins at /terms, like:
You can get there by clicking “Terms of Service” at the bottom of any page.
