Does it actually matter?
You can participate, but it’s such a hassle :-/
- You find a post on <foreign instance> (because the feed on your small home instance is very limited) and just want to upvote it.
- You get to the login screen and remember that this isn’t your home instance.
- You open your home instance, navigate to the search form.
- You try to find the link for the original post that you can enter in hour home instance’s search bar (which isn’t at all easy to find if you don’t know where to look).
- You paste the link in your home instance’s search form.
- You open the post on your home instance.
- You vote.
This is frankly unacceptably complicated for a regular, casual user to just cast a vote on a post.
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 to experience massive slowdowns and losses of basic functionality every time spez pissed off reddit again.
I’m still trying to figure it out. I joined feddit.uk just because I’m in the UK. Then I realised most of the communities were about politics and football teams. I read about Beehaw and like the sound of that so joined up there. Then realised that they had defederated from lemmy.world (which I understand and am not complaining about). So I created an account on lemmy.world as well.
I guess the thing to figure out is to find the communities you are interested in, subscribe to them and make sure your instance is federated with whatever instance those communities are part of. Then it doesn’t really matter which one you join? If you just want to scroll mindlessly through posts from all of Lemmy, I guess you can just find an instance that is federated with everything and set your filter to ‘All’ and go nuts.
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:
- Smaller more interest based. The advantage here is your local timeline/feed will closer match what you’re into.
- 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
