The Fediverse is huge and overwhelming to a newcomer, with many different types and each with servers to pick from. Which ones would you suggest checking out or avoiding?
Whatever ones you like. Newcomers don’t know how each instance behaves until they’ve experienced it.
Even for things we’re excited about, truncating the y-axis is never okay 😕
Assuming we’re talking about instances we’d recommend to new Fediverse users, I’d recommend against lemmy.world. Not because there’s anything wrong with the instance, but simply because it’s the largest, by a fairly large margin. A central principal of the fediverse is decentralization, and to that end, it’s healthier to spread the users across many instances than to have folks concentrated too heavily on any one.
A central principal of the fediverse is decentralization, and to that end, it’s healthier to spread the users across many instances than to have folks concentrated too heavily on any one.
It’s certainly healthier for the whole to have users spread across instances, but that’s a matter of emergence. What’s your pitch to convince an individual to choose a smaller instance, when it’s far more likely that their instance will cease to exist, taking their identity, history and hosted communities with it?
It’s trust and uptime data so it seems. Pick the server you think is most trustworthy and will stand the longest.
I figured joining the biggest one would be the most exciting and active. I believe federation happens when a user on one instance follows another, so joining a smaller one might mean you miss some content. I could be wrong though.
You’re only missing content if your instance defederates from another and vice versa or if you block instances yourself.
It might be a bit easier to find new communities at first by scrolling through the local feed on a bigger community, but you can also do this without making an account there.
I think stability and speed of an instance are better selection criteria since they effect your experience much more. Piefed instances tend to offer a smooth and fast experience. E.g. piefed.social, piefed.zip, and the others mentioned in one of the other comments.
You’re only missing content if your instance defederates from another and vice versa or if you block instances yourself.
You’re missing content from communities that no one on your instance follows yet.
Yep, but piefed and lemmy both have tools to propogate communities to small instances so that they can be discovered and followed. So you won’t see content that no one on the instance is interested in, but if someone is, they’ll be able to find the community for it, even if they’re on a small instance.
That’s good to know!
tankies need to be on thier own instances so they can circlejerk each other. politics is problematic in .world, they try to hid subtley calling people antisemtitic
deleted by creator
Lemmy.world is actually defederated from some larger instances, and many smaller ones defederate it for being too dominating.
Problem with lemmy.world is that because it’s got so open registration, some instances block it entirely. Though it’s a good place to start and know what to expect. Because Lemmy is pretty slow, I personally prefer to browse All - New and just block all Communities (and instances) that I don’t want to see. I subscribe too of course for those times I just want to see the content I’m actually interested in but for casual browsing, browse by all.
There are tools nowadays that share communities around to smaller instances through bot accounts that auto subscribe.
It also makes it easier when you create a community, now it will automatically show up on most instances.
It basically works like that on Mastodon, but on Lemmy, etc. you will see most of the content of all federated instances.
It’s common for new users to overthink the choice of instance - it doesn’t make a huge difference for most users and you can always switch if you find a better fit in the future.
You can pick one that is local to your country/region, or if you have a special interest like art or environmental activism, you may be able to find one that specializes in that. Otherwise choose any instance that is stable.
I joined this one because the main one was defederating a whole bunch of pirate ones and that makes no goddamn sense. thanks 👍
mods will be like hey let’s make it so our users can’t access stuff. that makes sense. I bet that’s what they want. they want to not have access to things. they think it’s good
smart and federal
.world is squeamish about upsetting corpos because they’re the biggest instance.
One that is not blocked by a lot of other instances…
Anyone know why the recent spike? That’s not negligible.
https://lemmy.world/post/43035743/22099833 Apparently old forum software was updated to use the federation and all the old users got tallied up and added. Also people flocking from Reddit and X too.
Because reddit moderation has become utterly unbearable, insufferable bad.
I’ve been using BBSs, newsgroups, MIRC, ICQ, a million ass forums and social media for almost 40 years now.
I’ve never been banned from anywhere on the net (and before).
And yet in the last three months I’ve been temp banned 3 times on reddit. All for their AI moderation systems misunderstanding Australian colloquialisms as threatening violence.
It’s utter bullshit.
People are leaving reddit as a result.
“Toss some shrimp on the barbie”
What? Is this Aussie for kill CEOs?? Banned.
Just browse Join-Lemmy and pick an instance that sticks out and you like the vibe of, with good local communities and decent federation. The only one I truly recommend avoiding is Lemmy.world, due to its size and moderation on some larger communities.
Just FYI everyone, this spike is sort of a glitch and its quite obvious just from looking at how steep the curve is. It all comes from nodebb which is a forum software and i guess they switched on federation on 11.01.2026 which gave us this magical bump.
They are real users probably, but what i mean is that this wasnt a rush of new users, but just old (mostly inactive) users that were never considered part of the fediverse until now.
Still increases footprint/grants more credibility to the Fediverse, which I think is a good thing. It just won’t really impact the daily experience here
On a slightly different note NodeBB is very cool and worth checking out. Did those unaware it’s a Goodreads, Letterboxd, Steam Reviews, etc all rolled into one.
For someone entirely new to this, please ELI5 why it matters?
Entirely at random I signed up at feddit.uk
Does it mean I’m walled off from specific content? Am I in a dead part of the fediverse? And how do I change if I am.
Okay, so it matters for a few reasons.
-
Instances have different rules. So you can banned by your own instances local admins for things you might not get banned for on other instances.
-
If you wanted to make your own community, you’d automatically be hosting it on feddit.uk, so that matters to a degree when it comes to the local culture there.
-
Instances have their own blocklists. So your instance might be blocking (defederating) another instance that has a lot of users. Or it might just as likely be blocked by another instance. This isn’t the case for feddit.uk, which maintains wide federation.
Feddit.uk specifically is a UK based lemmy. If you look up the local communities, you can see that is the geographical/cultural focus.
-
It doesn’t. Pick whatever instance and if another catches your eye make an account there as well. You don’t have to limit yourself to one account on one instance. I started on feddit.de, then lemm.ee now hexbear and use this account to see some posts I wouldn’t from hexbear since they have more of a safe space mentality than this instance
^In this same boat, thank you for asking this^
Thanks
+1 for Hexbear, check it out if .world is too liberal for you. This place really feels like reddit, but somehow even more Dem apologist
+1 Hexbear if you like increasingly abstracted inside jokes about owls and beans
beans
Totally organic account right here, definitely not an alt
deleted by creator
You have a🔻in your username. That makes you a “tankie” to a huge portion of the people who hate communists, too. We’re both going to get sent to the same camps.
deleted by creator
Wait, you don’t support Hamas?
deleted by creator
Hamas is genocidal
me when I make shit up
Honestly I don’t think this person is saying Hamas is genocidal. I think he’s very confused and is really insistent that tankies love genocide, so he was trying to like, pre-move me. But as far as I can tell the implied genocidal regime he’s opposed to is China, not Hamas. Obviously that opens a whole other can of worms but he won’t reply to my last comment.
Well yeah it does, you’re on lemmy.world which sometimes has a lot of Zionist apologia. In most online political spaces, the🔻symbol is a reference to videos from Hamas where they would overlay a similar red triangle over an Israeli soldier/tank/military target before it gets hit.
I guess it’s still germane to my point, though. If you do think Hamas is cool because you hate the genocidal regime of Israel, that makes you a “tankie” or at least comparable to one in the eyes of most anticommunists. Functionally, the people who actually will fight “tankies” (as in communists) area also the people who will put you in a camp for being anti-zionist or having other left wing positions.
deleted by creator
Lol. These are the people calling you tankies
Since when was the Palestinian resistance to genocide genocidal themselves? What kind of hasbara is this?
I’m on Lemmy.zip and someone said that I would fit into that community. Would I recommend it? Yes.
Zip is awesome! I switched over to db0, but simply because of a technical glitch on .zip like a year ago now, which was rapidly fixed by the admin… and I was too impatient to withstand not being able to post, lol.
A+ instance imo.
What’s awesome about it?
The monthly updates on !home@lemmy.zip
Great head admin, good variety of local communities, great users?
I also recommend lemmy.zip or piefed.zip
Seconding .zip! I haven’t had any qualms with it since joining a few months ago
Blahaj.zone we’re chill AF here
I don’t like that you can’t downvote, though.
I’ve only been outside of Hexbear (where there also are no downvotes) for a week and I hate having downvotes. Instead of people replying to something they disagree with with evidence and counterarguments, people just downvote and move on. They really shouldn’t be used to downvote comments people disagree with (because that just promotes groupthink), ideally they’d just be used to downvote spam and low effort stuff; but moderators can take care of that, so what’s the point?
I prefer that the community have some say in deciding what comments are objectionable rather than relying on mods for every little thing.
If something is objectional you should say something about it, it’s one thing for bots and spam, but if you see someone posting an unforced error, you should tell them they’re wrong
not to invoke leddit, but you should be able to communicate with other human beings
To be clear, one comment having 1-2 upvotes and a reply to it having a dozen or more upvotes gets that across just fine, it just requires the reply in the first place.
Okay, so the community should be able to reply to the objectionable comments with the reasons why they think they’re objectionable. All downvotes do is let people shut down the conversation without even thinking.
Sometimes comments are poor without being worthy of a conversation about it. The commenter can always ask if they see downvotes and are confused as to why.
In that situation those low value comments that aren’t explicitly rulebreaking just proceed to get no upvotes and are functionally the same as a comment that got downvoted. So there isn’t really any value gained from having downvotes in this scenario, while they provide negative value in other scenarios.
Exactly. I look at downvotes on articles as a kind of fact curator. If an article has 50/50, you know it’s gotta be wrong.
Discussion of an article’s accuracy is what the comments are for; downvotes are a pretty bad indicator of this as they’re largely used to indicate agreement with the post’s title (which may include disagreeing with it’s accuracy, message, vibe, spelling, etc.)
People also just downvote stuff they disagree with. If you use the downvotes on a post or comment as the indicator of whether it’s correct or not you’ll just end up believing only the things the majority of the users believe are true, instead of using evidence or any kind of facts.
9 day old account on ml. Stop trolling
One day this account will be 2 years old and its posts will be recognized for their greatness. But until then, it’ll just be a sockpuppet troll account. Very sad.
Ah, well that would explain why Voyager kept giving errors every time I tried
OHHH THAT’S why Voyager gives me an error.
Sigh, these are the things that might drive people away from Lemmy and Piefed. Lemmy devs are tankies, Piefed devs are weirdly puritanical, and instances won’t tell you they don’t allow downvotes.
Wait what that’s not a thing on blahaj??
Nor on Hexbear, or a few other large instances. In the case of Hexbear and Blahaj, it’s to protect queer users from being unfairly downvoted, as well as to encourage discussion over silent downvoting.
I really wish Blahaj was federated with Hexbear :(
Are you though? Not as enlightened as you may think.
Are you high?
Responding to someone saying ‘you’re not as enlightened as you think’ with some drug sitgmatisation, on point
come down from your ivory tower bud
deleted by creator
Moderation should be honest, and without a clear set of rules with an honest way to check it, the fediverse won’t displace the big social medias that themselves lose users because of dishonest moderation.
What the fuck are you on about?
This feels like you’re vagueposting about something entirely unrelated.
Nobody knows wtf you’re talking about mate. You just sound unhinged.
Nobody gives a shit what you, or any of your other bodies, thinks, mate.
Ah, okay, you’re unhinged. Have a good day. Blocked
How is .blahaj.zone’s moderation dishonest?
you have never said why it’s not as they claim. How did blahaj lemmy hurt you?
As far as I understand, lemmy instances are sort of a community with communities inside. It seems that each isntance has their own like minded userbase. .world has basich mix of everyone due to popularity, .ml holds strong beliefs politically, blahaj.zone is more progressive in gender identity, piefed.social is more mainstream decentralized instance. And of course there are more I didn’t mention.
I am on dbzer0 because I am into selfhosting and sailing the seas. It fits me well. Tied to one instance doesn’t stop me from engaging on other instances except the ones I blacklisted.
Check the instances and their descriptions and find something that fits you.
In addition to being a themed community of communities, instances also have different federation/defederation policy. dbzer0 is defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, for example, while being federated with Hexbear.net. There’s also the differences on how upvoting and downvoting is treated among instances, with some disabling downvotes and some disabling voting altogether.
db0 and sh. are my viiiibbbbbee
db0 wants to ban feddit communities because they believe that mods not letting death threats pass there in moderation passes as zionism.
This is the kind of statement that is so far at the extremes of both vague and unhinged that it’s not so much that I don’t believe you as that I would need to see some kind of evidence of multiple specific and unambiguous incidents. TLDR; you can’t just say that kinda thing with 0 receipts.
I don’t know how to get a generic link to a post so it opens on your instance. But the proof they’re tying to use is laughable. Source: https://feddit.org/post/25634446
I honestly can’t tell if this is just my ADHD or if this is just an overly dense philosophical argument that in true internet fashion has just gotten completely out of hand. There’s no damn good reason for anyone who will never physically set foot in any of these places to have opinions on this topic of that complexity or intensity.
Like my opinion on the topic is mostly that my country should definitely stop giving Israel weapons and probably send the Palestinians some food water and medical supplies. Other than that I’m not personally going to impose my opinions overtop those of people who actually live there.
The answer to imperialism isn’t trying to align your views with whichever side you’ve decided is the most right then loudly philosophizing about it from thousands of miles away. It’s the kind of thing you can’t undo, you can only stop doing it. The answer to imperialism is to shut the fuck up and stop meddling. Now the internet as a whole isn’t great at that (especially not the shutting up part), and I don’t think I’ll ever find a space that’s free of it. So I’m just gonna go with the place that seems as agnostic on the most issues as possible and try not to overthink shit that’s, in the end, none of my damn business.
Honestly I have my own political beliefs about the attrocities committed by Israel, but that’s not the issue here. I think it harms the fediverse in cases like this when the choice of their members gets restricted by universally banning these communities on your instance. This vote is also framed in a certain way and anything but democratic in that sense. Theres not a pro and con argument list or a neutral statement. The db0 admin just doesn’t like the way feddit mods moderate so he framed it in a way that legitimizes him banning these communities. But honestly this is not worth my god damn time. I only know if I was on db0 I’d move to another instance
db0 is also pro-GenAI, which seems unfortunate to me.
You can do what I do and just block the genAI art comms.
No harm, no foul, I just am not interested in the content.
While I can’t say for certain, I would strongly suspect that a lot of the people in those comms are self hosting their LLMs/Image generators, if that makes you feel any better.
But uh, there are a variety of nuanced stances on LLMs and such, amongst the other m@teys I’ve talked with.
Its… not like we’re all super duper no holds barred put AI in everything advocates.
A lot of us are… quite a lot closer to ‘Butlerian Jihad NOW’, lol.
At the risk of starting an argument (sorry)… I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people. It’s stealing the results of hard work of people to produce derivative work with the intent of replacing those same people. Thus, while self-hosting does remove some concerns related to big corporations, I think it still empowers them by supporting the tech they deal in.
I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.
And of course an instance isn’t homogenous with regard to its users, and I don’t condemn people for using db0, but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.
I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people.
I mean personally, I do as well.
But… it’s Pandora’s box.
You can’t uninvent it, basically.
We could theoretically limit or heavily regulate its further development, but again realistically, with how much money and power tech corporations have, how much influence they have over lawmakers…
… unless you’re gonna go find an ‘AI’ datacenter and put salt or sulfuric acid or something into the cooling loops, no you probably can’t really do much to effectively impede it.
I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.
I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.
I don’t know that it like, stems or comes from GenAI comms on db0.
but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.
Well I don’t know precisely what db0’s (the admin) exact stance on GenAI is, but I do know that db0 the instance and community has a highly involved and active goverance model for instance rules and associations. There are fairly often major discussions and votes on a good deal of issues… as opposed to many other instances that basically just come down to the whims of the admin + a clique of powermods.
db0 themself has done more than any other instance admin I am aware of to make it so that if the community itself opposes their own personal opinion, they’ll adopt the community’s opinion and simply be an executor/facilitator of it.
I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.
I’m pretty sure some of the most popular communities on db0 use GenAI art for banner and icon - checking now, the banner art for piracy, ADHD memes, anarchism, yepowertrippingbastards appear to be GenAI (admittedly fewer than I expected), and the icon for the instance itself is suspicious.
Unfortunately though, that’s also not a problem exclusive to db0, and with the nature of federation it’s kinda inescapable when most people don’t care, unless I want to lock myself to niche communities.
I will also note, I believe db0 is hosting or participating in some kind of distributed GenAI network called The Horde, so it’s not just individual community members’ opinions, it’s an organizational endorsement of GenAI.
!main@sh.itjust.works they are very new-user friendly, diaspora: idfk its dead, mastodon: official instance, peertube: peertube.wtf with official app to do federation stuff
Second for sh.itjust.works
I picked this server cause the name was funny and it was large enough that I expected not to run into small-server problems.
I stayed because I have not run into any small-server problems and our admin is a very cool guy.
peertube: peertube.wtf with official app to do federation stuff
I assume you can login into it via GrayJay as well
never used grayjay to begin with, used different apps for different fediverse stuff
