Unless I’m overlooking it, join-lemmy provides no essential info to choosing an instance. It doesn’t display uptime, location, number of users, age, or number of connected instances.
I used It and ended up on an instance that seemed to be missing many male** communities and was on the other side of the planet from me (though fortunately did not have too many other users). Then I followed a different instance browser and found a much better one for me.
EDIT: ** was supposed to say major communities, not male communities. But I’m leaving it because
Which is a problem. The onboarding for the fediverse - especially choosing a lemmy instance if that is the direction you want - is way too obtuse right now. Instances are definitely not all equal, and the icon and description are the least useful data points to rely upon.
Admins / instance owners can control what other instances and communities the local users have access to. And entire instances can be dropped automatically because of long response times.
This was one of the top instances recommended on join-lemmy, and it couldn’t find top communities from lemmyverse. Out of curiosity, I poked my head back to the instance a second ago, and I see users asking the server owner about it.
Maybe my experience is rare, but if the instance you choose is going to have a material effect on what instances and communities you can interact with, that’s essential info to choosing a home.
Unless I’m overlooking it, join-lemmy provides no essential info to choosing an instance. It doesn’t display uptime, location, number of users, age, or number of connected instances.
I used It and ended up on an instance that seemed to be missing many male** communities and was on the other side of the planet from me (though fortunately did not have too many other users). Then I followed a different instance browser and found a much better one for me.
EDIT: ** was supposed to say major communities, not male communities. But I’m leaving it because
I don’t think most people are going to take that second step though. Most people will look up the main website and choose something from there
Which is a problem. The onboarding for the fediverse - especially choosing a lemmy instance if that is the direction you want - is way too obtuse right now. Instances are definitely not all equal, and the icon and description are the least useful data points to rely upon.
What do you mean by missing communities?
Searching for specific communities and they aren’t present on the server.
All communities exist across the fediverse, it doesn’t matter on which instance you personally are. Or am I missing something?
Admins / instance owners can control what other instances and communities the local users have access to. And entire instances can be dropped automatically because of long response times.
Yeah, defederation exists but that doesn’t (shouldn’t?) happen that often.
This was one of the top instances recommended on join-lemmy, and it couldn’t find top communities from lemmyverse. Out of curiosity, I poked my head back to the instance a second ago, and I see users asking the server owner about it.
Maybe my experience is rare, but if the instance you choose is going to have a material effect on what instances and communities you can interact with, that’s essential info to choosing a home.