Asklemmy

lemmy.world is more open and performant than lemmy.ml and Beehaw.

I started on https://midwest.social (Lemmy) before Kbin was on my radar because I'm from the Midwest. There are things I like about both platforms. I'm spending more time on kbin.social right now because Midwest is having performance issues, but I like the community there, so I may hang out on both and see where the platforms go with development, features, mobile apps, and the feel for the local community.

I read the rules for a bunch of US-based Lemmy instances, as I wanted one with low latency -- if I'm going to be seeing the whole Fediverse through it, I want it to be peppy -- and I'm in the US. Many kind of took what I'd call a censorship-heavy position from the get-go -- like, creating a safe space for LGBT users or something was the highest priority.

There was one Dutch Lemmy instance that specifically mentioned free speech, but I was hunting for something with good latency, and pinging it with mtr had relatively-high latency.

There was a US Pleorama instance (IIRC freespeechextremist.com or something like that) that mentioned free speech. Pleorama, I understand, can federate with lemmy, and IIRC its default max comment size is longer. Unfortunately, browsing it without registering seemed that most of it seemed to be racist. I'd like a platform that doesn't try, as a top priority, to shut down everyone who is racist or otherwise offensive instancewide, but also not to drop into stuff that's just racism.

One thing that I did notice, skimming the content on said rather-racist server, was that they highlighted a Lemmy dev saying that he actively wanted to make it difficult for right-wingers to use the Lemmy platform. That didn't sit well with me at all -- I don't want to try to be using a platform that is actively opposed to right-wingers, nor to be in conflict with the developers of the platform on the matter, as it could lead to friction down the line. I also wasn't enthralled with the fact that Lemmy had a slur filter by default (though I'll concede that I don't know whether kbin does or not).

Kbin.social had rules that didn't from the get-go heavily talk about trying to restrict users and also wasn't purely serving up objectionable stuff. I tried it and discovered the fact that it had support for both Twitter-style microblogging and Reddit-style functionality, unlike Lemmy's focus on just Reddit functionality. I am most interested in Reddit-style functionality, but if I could get integrated microblogging, that'd be even better. Hence, I stuck with kbin.social, and so far, it's been unexpectedly good. There are a few UI quirks (e.g. the comment field is at the bottom of the page rather than the top), but people provided userscript fixes for that and other differences from Reddit within hours of me showing up. I'm broadly very happy with the UI -- the decisions made are basically what I would have liked to see from Reddit. Has a dark mode, though I use Dark Reader, essentially making it unnecessary.

I don't totally understand the kbin.social infrastructure -- I have low latency to kbin.social with mtr, but I don't know if that means that that's just some kind of Cloudflare-based frontend server in the US and the backend is located in Poland, where the developer is, or what. He does have a note currently in the sidebar referring to a "server room", which makes me think that he is physically near at least some of the infrastructure.

I'm a network engineer and love self hosting, so I put up my own node to try to give back.

No one is using it but me yet, but it's there 😁

I picked my regional one (technically also better for latency)

I joined slrpnk earlier in the year when I was excited about having installed my own home powerplant.

I figured my instance would make it easier to satisfy my requirement to tell everyone I use Arch, btw.

Sticking with BeeHaw for their community (usually browse local only) and now Kbin for the wider fediverse. I'd use Fedia.io over kbin.social (to put less strain on Kbin.social) but fedia.io isn't federating perfectly yet and seems to have image issues. I'm sure @Jerry will have it running smooth soon enough and I'll probably migrate my Kbin/fediverse-wide browsing there.

I chose programming.dev because i am a programmer and developer.

I chose kbin because lemmy.ml blocks my Google Fi VPN, so fuck 'em I guess.

i moved over to lemmy.world after i heard somewhere that lemmy.ml was run by a tankie and had been censoring proof of the tiananmen square massacre. idk if it's true or not, but I didn't wanna take any chances.

It was near the top of the join Lemmy recommendations that day, I like piracy, and it didn't have any hoops to jump through to make an account, not even a email address.

I joined sh.itjust.works because my application at lemmy.one was taking a while and I mean, who doesn't want to be a sh.it.head 🙃

I landed at vlemmy.net. I tried to register at a few bigger ones that gave infinite circles. By the time I got to vlemmy I wasn't really being too picky anymore, I was just trying to figure out if the problem was me or overloading.

A nice side effect of landing there is that some of my very few subscriptions are on beehaw, and we haven't been defederated.

I created my own because I wanted a more specific type of instance, a place that I would want to read the local feed rather than just see randomness. I also wanted to create a space that I felt at home.

You're welcome to come say hello at Wayfarers' Haven - sign-ups are open but do need a short application to keep things ship-shape.

I'm still getting used to the concept of federation so... I created my initial account on beehaw because I liked it's ethos about being a safe and welcoming space. Then they defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, which produced a lot of content i was going to be missing out on, so i created an alt on lemmy.world. I then realized this meant I'd have to swap back and forth between accounts to see both instances activity, so i moved to reddthat which is a nice little australian community, and this allows me to participate in beehaw posts, as well as lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works without switching accounts