Is there any difference between Lemmy instances? If so, what are they? How do people choose an instance? How does one decide one instance over another?
On a related topic, do you have any opinions about specific instances? Not trying to start a beef battle or anything. Just curious in learning more.
I personally found a “service” about Lemmy instances about a year ago, with half a dozen instances “highlighted”, advising picking a popular but not too popular one, so I chose the one I use now (though I use Jerboa, extremely rarely the website). Now, I’m curious about learning more and seeing what other options could offer, if anything (not that I ever had any problem with Lemmy Today). Having an alternative could also be useful if there is ever an outage in one instance.
lemmy.world is a reddit clone, reddit-tier politics
lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net extreme communist (hexbear.net consists mostly of trans people)
lemmy.ml is mostly communist but gets more sorts of people than the two above
lemmy.dbzer0.com is focused on piracy
I always thought hexbear pronouns were making fun of trans people given some of them have like 10 sets and some of them are things like comrade
Mander.xyz for science
Beehaw.org for being nice
Dozens of smaller mainstream-ish instances.
I’d like to see more specialization by area of interest. The monolithic style like lemmy.world replicates many of the problems of reddit, which we avoided with its predecessors, interest-specific forum sites.
True… could you please elaborate about Beehaw? I would like to hear more about them.
“What is Beehaw”: https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/core-principles/what-is-beehaw/
TL;DR: Beehaw.org is intentionally curated and moderated to try and maintain a “nice” environment free of aggression and trolling.
The influx of Reddit refugees last year was a bit of a shock to their system. The Beehaw admins have floated the idea of leaving Lemmy entirely.
We defederated from a few of the larger servers early on because of moderation problems. It’s a bit quieter without world but still very nice!
frightful_hobgoblin gave a pretty good rough overview of the bigger instances.
Some instances are more geared towards a certain “culture”. Once you browse enough of Lemmy you tend to get a feel for it. For instance, I chose my instance because a lot of the communities are centered around hobbies and interests so it’s more lighthearted, and the admins seem to be very focused on providing a positive experience as well as ensuring federation is done right. You’ll just need to keep this culture of an instance in mind when browsing communities on different instances. The level of moderation can vary significantly between them.
I haven’t tried it myself but my understanding is you can move your account to a different instance should you choose to in the future. So keep that in mind if you feel like at one point you don’t like your instance.
Is there any difference between Lemmy instances? If so, what are they?
The only differences I’ve seen are the ideologies and focus. Some are about tech, other about anime, are others are echo chambers, I guess.
How do people choose an instance? How does one decide one instance over another?
I can’t exactly tell how people choose their instances, but it’s either perfomancy, theme focus or ideology.