we bacily have a similar story, i use to be in lemmy.fmhy.ml because of how open it was to discussion but i believe its gone now which stinks, so i moved to lemm.ee which im ok with at the moment, i guess.

Joined programming.dev because it is more related to my interests

Started with wirebase.org because it's local, but there was a lot of downtime. Switched to lemmy.sdf.org because they're also local, but are also a really old group that still hosts Usenet stuff. I've recently learned that they have never defederated though, and so I'm considering leaving because I don't believe in giving a platform to obvious disinformation and hate campaigns.

Started with lemm.ee just because it was the first instance I found when I looked up lemmy. Moved over to lemmy.world when I tried to customise my profile a bit and hit the image size cap but now I’m spending most of my time back on lemm.ee anyway because lemmy.world seems to be offline most of the time.

lemmy.world was the only one that didn't glitch out when I tried to join the day the reddit blackout started.

I just liked the vibe and name of Kbin. It reminded me of Kerbin, the home planet in Kerbal Space Program.

I later learned it might be the Polish word for magazine. The "subreddits" here are called magazines, but it could also mean like gun magazine. The latter of which I don't really care for (especially as a US user), but in the end, I don't really gaf. It's just a chill place to hang out.

Beehaw because of their friendliness combined with a very low tolerance for trolls and hate speech, plus Kbin.social because they haven’t defederated with any major instances.

I like the name and it's a smaller server than many which is nice

This was recommended when I made my account. There weren't any regional communities for where I'm from, so Finland seems as good a choice as any.

I'm not sure I made an informed decision, but if there are real downsides to my choice I haven't noticed them yet. I seem to be able to see the things I want to. I have to use the block button liberally, but I can't see that being instance related. It's largely due to using All at times, and not having strong enough tagging/filtering tools to make that workable without blocking tons of communities that are fine, but not for me.

Because it is close to "Reddit".

Super lame, but that was the criteria and it made me laugh at myself.

Because unilem has a policy of not defederating from other instances. If I see a post I don't want to see again I can block it, but it's my decision.

I joined Kbin due to a Mastodon post around launch. I currently use Camp instance as I’m a beta tester for Artemis.
On Lemmy I join ml as that was what people on Reddit were doing. I’m beta testing Bean app. Artemis and Bean are two of the best and most beautiful apps.

Because I enjoy FMHY resources, it was my primary instance; if it returns without trouble I will remain there. I'm currently at kbin.social since I wanted to try kbin.

I looked at it, it seemed mostly vanilla, had good servers, didn't have defederation drama like lemmy.world, thought it's cool.

I'd be open to move to a "leftist" lemmy instance, but as a staunch anarchist I'm not really compatible with lemmygrad or hexbear.

I started on lemmy.fmhy.net, then jumped to lemm.ee when I heard about the domain issues. But I wasn't aware of just how big lemm.ee really was, and I like the idea of being on a smaller instance to help with decentralization. I looked around and saw leminal.space and I thought that was a pretty good pun. It was really as simple as that.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

I started on .ml way before the reddit fallout. Once I actually started using it, I spun up my own instance.

But, based on these comments, hexbear.net sounds like a fun place....

Kinda picked it at random when scrolling through my choices.

It just works when lemmy.world didn't

Started on lemmy.ml, when they were experiencing some performance issues I decided to "be distributed" away from one of the main instances. Decided on one geographically in my home country.

Only user on my instance - admittedly this is my mod account not my primary, it still lives elsewhere on one of the main instances. I'm still unsure if running a niche instance that's designed to host communities, if I should also open registration or not.