I was planning to sign up at BeeHaw because it seems pretty active and with high quality discussions. When I heard that it had defederated from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world I decided not to sign up to any of those three as I would rather have access to all of them (though I can understand why BeeHaw defederated). So I just went with VLemmy.net as it was one of the recommended ones (on join-lemmy.org and the Awesome-Lemmy-Instances GitHub) and seems to be very broadly federated.

I don't think it matters too much, though I think if you were signed up on the same instances as all your favourite communities it would be a bit more convenient.

I'm hosting my own. I had a free server with 9GB RAM and 99GB disk space, and it was only running my Mastodon server until now. I like the freedom to do what I want with the server :)

I was going to choose sopuli.xyz but you need to give them a reason to why you want there and I never heard back from them and logging in does nothing, so I assume I was not selected. I say it would be fair if there was some message to go f myself so that I wouldn't be held in eternal limbo.

So I chose lemmy.world as it's a general purpose instance and immediate registry.

it was canadian

Initially made an account with the instance opened after my country's subreddit made the shift, but on Jerboa trying to look at other instance content was really rough.

So I joined here since I enjoy the content, and raise the black flag every so often.

I chose mine because it disallows NSFW on its own communities and takes a hard stance against defederation while not being defederated. I want to have more control over my feed and not be isolated.

It federates with the servers that have some stuff I want access to on them, and it also has rules against being a huge douche. And it's supported by Jerboa.

That's pretty much it. Mix of convenience and what passes for my moral scruples.

Was initially on lemmy.zip because it seemed really chill and that was such a cool instance name. I had no problems with it whatsoever but I realised it didn't block out certain instances that I disliked (aka lemmygrad). Now I'm on lemmy.fmhy.ml and I'm loving it so far since it had everything I needed:

1. Blocks out lemmygrad
2. Allows talk on piracy and NSFW content
3. Loads better compared to the more overpopulated instances
4. Wasn't very restrictive and was very welcoming (didn't even ask me for a reason for joining)

I tried to find a server that isn't blocking anyone, and hasn't been defederated by any of the big servers.

I want to avoid an echo-chamber and have access to everything on the fediverse, including stuff I find distateful. If anything really bothers me I will block the community/instance myself, I don't want others making that choice for me.

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of folks out there just searching for an excuse to clutch their pearls, rile up a mob, and defederate anything and everything that offends them.

I don't want to circlejerk in a safe space echo chamber, I want to see both the yin and the yang of humanity. I want that wild west feeling of the internet of old

The TLD.

Was looking for a smaller instance (to help spread out the lemmy load a bit) which doesn't block many instances so I don't risk having an instance I want to see blocked. By the way I also use Arch

One of the few only lgbt friendly servers

I added an account to a few geared towards specific community types. Then I can easily switch accounts and view local.

I'm considering standing up an instance for this type of thing myself.

Is there really a difference between the different servers? I just browse all (It's lemm.ee btw)

Mod of a subreddit I was following created an instance, its was the easiest choice

Others did not exist back than.

IDK

I went with ReddThat as the past tense seemed apt. Also it's a small enough instance not to feel overwhelming, while being large enough to provide content.

I picked Rammy for the name and the sidebar:

Just another Lemmy instance. We've got a cool mascott though! Open to everyone.

Why trust some Big Tech corporation to host your data when some random geek can do it? All thanks to the power of the Fediverse!

Lemmy user for a couple of days here. I jumped on lemmy.world because it was big and the name suggested it was universal and open, it had open registration and allows nsfw content.

I suffered through the technical issues many of us experienced, but everything seems much better and smoother now (maybe because they were able to fix the issues, or maybe because enough people left because of them, I can't say!)

Does it matter what you use? Yes and no, I guess. Apparently the last few days performance issues were mostly local to dot-world. I did make another profile on lemm.ee and I noticed the different instances seem to show different feeds with some different content, but also many of the same posts from the same communities as well. I'm still trying to figure out how they decide what they show in their feeds. Something to do with federation, I guess, but I'm not pretending to understand the meaning of that concept yet. Given that instances can choose to federated or defederate, it seems like it must matter to some extent what instance you are on even though content can be shared between instances.

I went for what I believe to be the bigger one, because it might get a higher quality of support from third parties, and still be here after a year.