After spending a few days learning about lemmy and other fediverse websites, I was curious about people's processes for picking a server that is right for them. I've seen most posts say to pick one that is not too big or small and that has similar interests as yourself. But if we are all mostly federated, doesn't it make the most sense to join the biggest or likeliest server to stay around and federated with the most other servers? Then you can just travel to the instances you share interests in. I chose this instance because you could just sign up and be in it, and that was all I needed to check things out. And although I found many communities in other instances, even if let's say all of my subscribed communities are on other instances, doesn't it make sense to just stay here so long as they are federated with sh.itjust.works? It may be too early to know for sure, but it seems like this instance is going to stick around for the foreseeable future, why risk joining the smaller instances that might not be here for long. Also, if you have subscribed communities in several instances, I assume you have to follow all the different server's rules. I'd be curious to hear other people's thoughts in regards to picking a home instance.
Edit: Are there any restrictions to interacting with communities on other instances?
Just use kbin it's way better
Doesn't really solve the question of "how do I pick an instance," just substitutes one set of instances for another
Kbin is really only one instance (kbin.social - the only alternatives are alt language instances, I think?) so just use kbin social because it's 100% unfettered access then sub to what you want and block what you don't. It's just like Reddit/Twitter and it's nice not having head mods rule what you can and can't see
There’s definitely other instances that are English language now, fwiw.
https://fedia.io comes to mind, at least. I’ve seen a few others floating around.
My instance is one of the newer ones that are English language and is open for user sign ups. It feels weird “advertising” my own instance but I did make it to share the load with the others. Check out https://fediverse.boo as well!
I’m in the kbin social matrix chat with the main dev and some of the other instance admins. Thing’s definitely are looking more and more promising on the kbin side of things.
Sick, I didn't know that thanks. They all still seem to be mostly vanity urls and not moderation like beehaw though