sh.itjust.works Main Community

Honestly for the new user thinking to join just picking something, anything is all that matters.

Each user has very little content on here right now, so if for some reason they don't like the way things are run on the one they chose they can easily choose a different one without losing much. Profile migration (i.e. copy all your stuff to a different lemmy server) is also something coming that I'm looking forward to.

As a sh.itjust.works user you can see almost anything in this network of websites (500+ servers) except lemmygrad and beehaw. Also the server admin here is pretty cool and seems to know what he's doing, so I'm pretty smitten with my choice.

As far as the likelihood of a server going down, that's hard to say as you have no real way of knowing one will be more reliable than another at first glance. TBH I think the smaller servers in the network have the advantage here, their costs to run the server are lower since they have fewer users and less traffic. If they have the creation of new communities turned off, the space required is far less than otherwise. The main detractor with tiny servers is easily discovering whats on other servers. That's a longer explanation why that is, but it's like that and I've gone on too long already.

I avoided the bigger ones because they seemed to be under the heaviest load and thus most buggy/quirky.

I also wanted one to be more apolitical. So I went there first. Then that one had a multi-day outage. Then tried kbin but became flustered by its own immaturity (code wise) and struggles.

Eventually I just built my own instance.

@OP. Id pick an instance mostly open and federated with the larger communities. Even smaller instances are good here. The. Head to this page: https://lemmyverse.net/

Hit the house button and type your instance url and load up on subscriptions.

Why are you only picking one?

Federate yo shit, homie! There's no down side to checking them out.

It seems kind of inevitable that there will be a bit of a period of instability before things settle a bit, and it that time maintaining accounts on multiple instances is inevitable. I am running into a few reasonable issues with federation in lemmy that I am sure will be ironed out eventually.

But yeah, it is kind of a bummer to set yourself up on one instance, and then watch it get defederated from a another major instance, even if it is for ultimately justified reasons.

It was important for me to pick an instance that allowed nsfw content fairly liberally so I could post/share art I make. I also personally like to be able to talk to the server owner and didn't see having to be given access as a downside

I just picked the first one that let me in on the list. Federation is not as tight as I had imagined. I’ve been using mastodon for a few months only got here in the 12th.

I run my own services then just use federation to connect with many different instances. That way my instances stay up as long as I want them, and I can participate on my own terms without someone else telling me how I'm allowed to exist on the internet.

Only decentralization will prevent the platform from being broken by a few bad actors.

If instance X is federated with Y but not Z and instance Y and Z are federated with everyone. In that example people from Z can reply to posts on X or Y but only people from Y and Z will see the comments and (that's the part I'm not clear about) people from X could still reply on Z and everyone would see their comments.

That's how I understand it anyway.

My process was searching for a reddit alternative, finding Lemmy (generic) and somehow getting redirected to Lemmy.one sign up. I may make an account on another instance as Lemmy.one has community creation by users disabled but community creation isn't my motivation right now.

Because of federation, I just didn't think about it too hard. I clicked on Sh.itjust.works because the name made me giggle when I saw it, and signed up immediately because the first post I saw was the boss sharing server stats and being totally transparent about operations and intentions. At the time, it was one of the smaller instances that might not last.

Choosing "wrong" never seemed like a big deal, it's not hard to start fresh somewhere else if needed.

I honestly picked this one purely because it was performant on the day I switched from Reddit. Thankfully I've ended out really liking the direction it's going in too. I wouldn't be too worried about picking the right instance, just look for one you generally agree with the moderation and pick it. You can always switch to another one or have multiple accounts.

I've got multiple accounts for different instances, but this is my main one just because they allow me to post content 99% of the other instances really don't want to deal with.

Keep in mind your access to communities on other instances depends on other people on your instance behaving themselves. If an instance defederates with yours because they don't like somebody's comment, you also won't see any posts. Don't join any instances centered around polarizing topics unless you plan on only having discussions within local communities. Also at the moment it's not really possible for a single instance to support much more than 100K users, so Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world don't really want the signups.