The Fediverse is huge and overwhelming to a newcomer, with many different types and each with servers to pick from. Which ones would you suggest checking out or avoiding?
One that is not blocked by a lot of other instances…
Even for things we’re excited about, truncating the y-axis is never okay 😕
+1 for Hexbear, check it out if .world is too liberal for you. This place really feels like reddit, but somehow even more Dem apologist
Just browse Join-Lemmy and pick an instance that sticks out and you like the vibe of, with good local communities and decent federation. The only one I truly recommend avoiding is Lemmy.world, due to its size and moderation on some larger communities.
For someone entirely new to this, please ELI5 why it matters?
Entirely at random I signed up at feddit.uk
Does it mean I’m walled off from specific content? Am I in a dead part of the fediverse? And how do I change if I am.
Okay, so it matters for a few reasons.
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Instances have different rules. So you can banned by your own instances local admins for things you might not get banned for on other instances.
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If you wanted to make your own community, you’d automatically be hosting it on feddit.uk, so that matters to a degree when it comes to the local culture there.
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Instances have their own blocklists. So your instance might be blocking (defederating) another instance that has a lot of users. Or it might just as likely be blocked by another instance. This isn’t the case for feddit.uk, which maintains wide federation.
Feddit.uk specifically is a UK based lemmy. If you look up the local communities, you can see that is the geographical/cultural focus.
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^In this same boat, thank you for asking this^
Hexbear, pretty chill community that is overtly pro-LGBTQ and inclusive of all kinds of leftists.
😂
Why are there so many people coming here allegedly from this chart starting with this year
For me at least, reddits ban bot has gotten way too sensitive and the reviewers don’t actually read the appeal. I got a permaban for “threatening violence” just saying the word “kill” in context of a cat hunting birds, tried to appeal and immediately got a notification that the ban won’t be reversed, because they obviously didn’t read the comment that triggered the ban.
So now I’m here
I joined this one because the main one was defederating a whole bunch of pirate ones and that makes no goddamn sense. thanks 👍
mods will be like hey let’s make it so our users can’t access stuff. that makes sense. I bet that’s what they want. they want to not have access to things. they think it’s good
smart and federal
Well, it depends on what they want. There are different platforms in the fediverse that work very differently. Mastodon and Lemmy/PieFed can interact with each other, but it’s always painful. For Lemmy/PieFed I’d recommend they look for an instance that has a local feed that fits their interests. Ideally an instance that is federated with most large instances, otherwise it gets a little too boring.
Liked the name.
Blahaj.zone we’re chill AF here
I don’t like that you can’t downvote, though.
Ah, well that would explain why Voyager kept giving errors every time I tried
Exactly. I look at downvotes on articles as a kind of fact curator. If an article has 50/50, you know it’s gotta be wrong.
Discussion of an article’s accuracy is what the comments are for; downvotes are a pretty bad indicator of this as they’re largely used to indicate agreement with the post’s title (which may include disagreeing with it’s accuracy, message, vibe, spelling, etc.)
Wait what that’s not a thing on blahaj??
Nor on Hexbear, or a few other large instances. In the case of Hexbear and Blahaj, it’s to protect queer users from being unfairly downvoted, as well as to encourage discussion over silent downvoting.
Are you though? Not as enlightened as you may think.
Are you high?
Moderation should be honest, and without a clear set of rules with an honest way to check it, the fediverse won’t displace the big social medias that themselves lose users because of dishonest moderation.
What the fuck are you on about?
This feels like you’re vagueposting about something entirely unrelated.
Nobody knows wtf you’re talking about mate. You just sound unhinged.
Nobody gives a shit what you, or any of your other bodies, thinks, mate.
Ah, okay, you’re unhinged. Have a good day. Blocked
I live in the PNW. I picked an instance in the PNW. Sometimes I see local news, and often I read comments from people within a few hour drive. It’s nice to have a small, local community here, while still having access to the rest of the world together. So I guess recommend picking the largest instance in your region if you don’t have any other preferences.
The one I am on is from that area, even though I’m in the upper midwest. I just picked it because they don’t block anything, didn’t defederate any communities or anything. Hands off, fast enough, here to stay they say.
I had no idea this was a local instance. Neat!
[email protected] they are very new-user friendly, diaspora: idfk its dead, mastodon: official instance, peertube: peertube.wtf with official app to do federation stuff
peertube: peertube.wtf with official app to do federation stuff
I assume you can login into it via GrayJay as well
never used grayjay to begin with, used different apps for different fediverse stuff
Just FYI everyone, this spike is sort of a glitch and its quite obvious just from looking at how steep the curve is. It all comes from nodebb which is a forum software and i guess they switched on federation on 11.01.2026 which gave us this magical bump.
They are real users probably, but what i mean is that this wasnt a rush of new users, but just old (mostly inactive) users that were never considered part of the fediverse until now.
Still increases footprint/grants more credibility to the Fediverse, which I think is a good thing. It just won’t really impact the daily experience here
Assuming we’re talking about instances we’d recommend to new Fediverse users, I’d recommend against lemmy.world. Not because there’s anything wrong with the instance, but simply because it’s the largest, by a fairly large margin. A central principal of the fediverse is decentralization, and to that end, it’s healthier to spread the users across many instances than to have folks concentrated too heavily on any one.
A central principal of the fediverse is decentralization, and to that end, it’s healthier to spread the users across many instances than to have folks concentrated too heavily on any one.
It’s certainly healthier for the whole to have users spread across instances, but that’s a matter of emergence. What’s your pitch to convince an individual to choose a smaller instance, when it’s far more likely that their instance will cease to exist, taking their identity, history and hosted communities with it?
It’s trust and uptime data so it seems. Pick the server you think is most trustworthy and will stand the longest.
I figured joining the biggest one would be the most exciting and active. I believe federation happens when a user on one instance follows another, so joining a smaller one might mean you miss some content. I could be wrong though.
Lemmy.world is actually defederated from some larger instances, and many smaller ones defederate it for being too dominating.
Problem with lemmy.world is that because it’s got so open registration, some instances block it entirely. Though it’s a good place to start and know what to expect. Because Lemmy is pretty slow, I personally prefer to browse All - New and just block all Communities (and instances) that I don’t want to see. I subscribe too of course for those times I just want to see the content I’m actually interested in but for casual browsing, browse by all.
You’re only missing content if your instance defederates from another and vice versa or if you block instances yourself.
It might be a bit easier to find new communities at first by scrolling through the local feed on a bigger community, but you can also do this without making an account there.
I think stability and speed of an instance are better selection criteria since they effect your experience much more. Piefed instances tend to offer a smooth and fast experience. E.g. piefed.social, piefed.zip, and the others mentioned in one of the other comments.
You’re only missing content if your instance defederates from another and vice versa or if you block instances yourself.
You’re missing content from communities that no one on your instance follows yet.
Yep, but piefed and lemmy both have tools to propogate communities to small instances so that they can be discovered and followed. So you won’t see content that no one on the instance is interested in, but if someone is, they’ll be able to find the community for it, even if they’re on a small instance.
That’s good to know!
tankies need to be on thier own instances so they can circlejerk each other. politics is problematic in .world, they try to hid subtley calling people antisemtitic
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It basically works like that on Mastodon, but on Lemmy, etc. you will see most of the content of all federated instances.
It’s common for new users to overthink the choice of instance - it doesn’t make a huge difference for most users and you can always switch if you find a better fit in the future.
You can pick one that is local to your country/region, or if you have a special interest like art or environmental activism, you may be able to find one that specializes in that. Otherwise choose any instance that is stable.
There are tools nowadays that share communities around to smaller instances through bot accounts that auto subscribe.
It also makes it easier when you create a community, now it will automatically show up on most instances.
