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
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).
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for asking this. I’m that student that had the same question but was afraid to ask.
Then I hope the answers are enlightening to us both! Takeaways so far are just choose a smaller instance and see if you can find one that specializes in your specific interests. But making sure it’s an instance that will be well and reliably run is the part I can’t figure out yet.
I’m gonna take this back a bit cause my understanding of the All tab has changed significantly from people’s responses. It seems choosing a larger instance is better for discovery, cause the All tab you see is just what people in your instance are subscribed to only, not all of the federated lemmy instances and communities. So I’m going to stick with a large instance for now (lemmy.world), then if I see a lot of content better fitting what I’m looking for on another instance, join that, or at least make an alt there.
Usually, it is correct, that the all feed would be smaller on a small instance, but “seeders”, like lcs or lemmony can make the feed in all tab much larger.
It does this by subscribing to a lot communites. Lcs does for specific communities and lemmony subscribes to everything. You can see an example of an all tab with many subscriptions(added via lemmony) at my instance
I think the easist way to check, if an instance uses one of these seeders is to check the number of subscriptions in the instance. Or just ask the admin for the instance.
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.
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.
