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.
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.
It feels like starting a new instance is the trendy thing to do, similar to creating some new crypto shitcoin a few years ago. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, but I would imagine more deeply rooted instances would generally offer more support and be less likely to disappear.
Mine is very prone to this because I’m running it myself and I’m a dumbass
I don’t know, man. I think you could run the fediverse if you put your mind to it.
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.
True, but that brings up another point which I just edited into my parent comment- instance rules. Any communities you create will be hosted on your home instance and thus subject to your home instance’s rules. So you should make sure those rules align with the sort of activity you’ll want to be doing.
This could always change at the whim of an admin as well. It’s good to have admin “teams” and even foundations, but a lot of the time there’s one person making those decisions.
Users and communities could be more portable. Admins should get to decide what is on their instance for sure, but right now there’s kind of a “lock in.” Which give admins disproportional control / responsibility. IMO.
You mean blocked instances right? AFAIK an instances “blocked users” is not published in aggregate. You’d have to comb through the modlog.
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.
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.
