Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I'm intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don't know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it.
That made me curious of how you decided to join?
I firstly join to lemmy.fmhy.ml thanks to Spez and a Reddit post from FMHY subreddit, then the tragedy occurred, then I joined to lemmy.world which is/was my main one because I pictured it like a good home, then lemmy.fmhy.net revived and I am with them too, but seems like they are in a bit of trouble with the server, finally now I am in lemm.ee, but only because I just wanted another backup, not because I searched for it especially (also it was mentioned in a comment about smaller instances and one user from here throw a joke to not join here because it sucks so that way the server would be more stable, so yeah, I joined).
To be clear I am not in search for yet another instance (that sounds like a good instance name to be fair), I just want to know how the deciding process is for you, is it just random? Is it because of personal tastes?
I couldn't care less about NSFW stuff, I don't search for it specifically, but my day won't be ruined if I see a tit.
I like gaming, tech, Linux, SBC gaming, emulation, macOS, Android stuff etc (yeah how original) should I look for an instance dedicated to that if I ever want to join yet another one? Because I see topics like this in almost any instance.
I read you lemmings!
EDIT: BTW the migration process has been easier for me thanks to LASIM, so I wouldn't be scared if I ever want/have to migrate again.
I joined Beehaw first because I like their philosophy, the admins seem pretty level headed, and they're decently large. But they defederated from/were never federated with a couple of instances that I was interested in, so I made my own instance and am here now.
I did something similar with Beehaw, but found that Lemmy was making my Nas so much louder because of all the data it was writing to disk. So I decided to join programming.dev instead. Some day I want to host my own again but it's on hold for now
My poor NAS would explode if I ever want to self host an instance lol.
I've been running mine on a cheap (€4/mo) VPS from Hetzner since my ISP doesn't let me host from a residential IP.
My NAS is loud enough without lemmy; hate to see how loud it'd get with it
For what it's worth, i'm running it on a VPS that cost $25 USD for the year, and it is running fine.
I didn't want to open my homeserver up for lemmy.