-active enough to have a good sized feed of communities
Personally I don’t think this one matters so long as it federates content elsewhere in a timely manner. Pay close attention to uptime stats on the Fediverse Explorer. Sort by Active Users for best results - and it looks like lemmy.ca is another good option, defederating from Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.
-isnt an embarrassing name (looking at you sh.it.just.works)
You need to lower your standards at least a little bit because sh.itjust.works is probably one of the better servers out there. Mainly because their philosophy is the same as their namesake, which is almost certainly why they named themselves that. I think most people like it when Shit Just Works, and aren’t really fans of the jank, which is what a lot of the earlier days of Lemmy during the Reddit migration were like.
![[Comment restored] A person calls someone by their username. Mod considers this a personal attack and removes the comment](https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/b0f44379-3b22-4c99-80fa-e8cbaf1d0024.png){kind=link}
I’ve been struggling to find another instance that ticks all the boxes
-allows NSFW
-doesnt censor swear words
-allows downvotes
-isnt an embarrassing name (looking at you sh.it.just.works)
-defederated from hexbear and other troll instances
-doesnt cave to elitist interests (.world has now fucked this up)
-active enough to have a good sized feed of communities
If you want a US based-instance, https://discuss.online/ blocks hexbear and lemmygrad
If you want a non US instance, https://sopuli.xyz/ blocks hexbear and lemmygrad
Both are large enough to address your last point.
Personally I don’t think this one matters so long as it federates content elsewhere in a timely manner. Pay close attention to uptime stats on the Fediverse Explorer. Sort by Active Users for best results - and it looks like lemmy.ca is another good option, defederating from Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.
You need to lower your standards at least a little bit because sh.itjust.works is probably one of the better servers out there. Mainly because their philosophy is the same as their namesake, which is almost certainly why they named themselves that. I think most people like it when Shit Just Works, and aren’t really fans of the jank, which is what a lot of the earlier days of Lemmy during the Reddit migration were like.
You can block instances yourself, you don’t need to have your instance do that.
It’s still not the same level as defederating at the instance level: https://lemm.ee/post/46435607