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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Ask Lemmy
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I feel like having a preference kind of defeats the point?
I thought they were supposed to be interchangeable?
It's the communities yours supposed to care about.
That's always been the burning question for me. Why choose one over the other? What kind of attributes should I look at to do informed comparisons? Like server uptime, number of users, which instances they've federated with (or not federated with)...
And how and where can I see all this in one place? If it's truly interchangeable, which it really isn't, then why not have a single unified web front (which makes it more like a distributed service) to reduce confusion for most normal users?
I think the unified webfront is a bit tough, I believe right now the instance will pull from other instances if someone on the instance your in is following something from their instance
But you can really be on any instance and follow stuff from everywhere else, the search needs a bit of work in cataloging everything so a tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ is really useful in finding communities
I would also like to shout out https://lemmyverse.net, it's basically indexed every instance and every community (even minuscule instances like mine are counted), and I think it has a really good search and sorting function. Also, it does include KBin magazines, but you have to enable it in the settings menu in the upper right part of the screen.
That is awesome! Thanks!
No problem, I use it all the time, it's honestly vital for small instances like mine.
awesome thank you, just used it to find the elder scrolls oblivion community, hope to start seeing some of my favorite memes again
No problem at all, I'm glad that you were able to find a community you like!
Lemmy.world is noticeably slower and prone to have issues compared to the smaller instances for me.
the instance I'm on seems to be performant enough :)
I don’t really understand this either. I only have 1 account on Lemmy.world. I can see why some people have a backup. For me, it doesn’t seem necessary unless I’m missing something. If the server goes down temporarily, I’m fine with just waiting for it to come back. If it goes down permanently, then I’ll go ahead and create an account on another server.
The instance preference can be important if you look at the Local Communities timeline. Niche instances will usually have more communities relevant to that niche. However, with current user distribution most users are either on Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml.
A Federated space where this more apparent is on Mastodon. I joined SFBA,social because it is local to me (San Francisco Bay Area, California, US). The Local Timeline is all users on the instance. As a good proportion of them are from the area I can learn about local events/projects/news.
I think that's somewhat of an oversimplification. The point of the instances isn't to be interchangeable, it's to provide decentralization and lots of choice to Lemmy users. Lemmy itself is more or less just a protocol a bunch of different link aggregator sites are running on, each of which has its own administration style and community policy. There are lots of general-purpose Lemmy instances, lots of more niche ones, and a bunch of small/personal ones that don't have a strong identity yet, and all of them together form the Lemmy ecosystem.