I wanted to experience massive slowdowns and losses of basic functionality every time spez pissed off reddit again.

I’ve been happy with mastodon.world and Lemmy.world has the same admin(s).

I think there are two main schools of thought when choosing an instance:

1. Smaller more interest based. The advantage here is your local timeline/feed will closer match what you’re into.
2. Larger general interest. Your feed will be less tailored but you have the advantage of more stability, reliability, and commitment to maintaining the instance.

It’s the typical small fish in a big sea or a big fish in a small sea dichotomy

I read that it’s not a good idea to register to the biggest instances so that the user base is spread out. So, I found a nice instance about science and here I am on mander.xyz 🙃

I wanted a smaller instance and because I use Arch, btw.

In order of priority:-

• Hardware specs used to run the instance (for supporting active users, the beefier the better and the more reliable it makes the instance from going down)
• Instance sign up policies (I prefer closed, requested account creation, because the hardware then comfortably supports the active users, and also mitigates bot account creation spams)
• General support for popular federated content and level of defederation (can’t use lemmy properly without general federation)
• maybe ideology of the instance admin (?) but not really

I joined Sopuli 9 months ago, and they do a really good job with all of my categories.

I also created accounts on the main .ml and shit just works instance but one or the other factors failed there, where it didn’t here, so I’m waiting for Lemmy to allow account migration to fully get rid of those.