The instance preference can be important if you look at the Local Communities timeline. Niche instances will usually have more communities relevant to that niche. However, with current user distribution most users are either on Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml.
A Federated space where this more apparent is on Mastodon. I joined SFBA,social because it is local to me (San Francisco Bay Area, California, US). The Local Timeline is all users on the instance. As a good proportion of them are from the area I can learn about local events/projects/news.
That’s always been the burning question for me. Why choose one over the other? What kind of attributes should I look at to do informed comparisons? Like server uptime, number of users, which instances they’ve federated with (or not federated with)…
And how and where can I see all this in one place? If it’s truly interchangeable, which it really isn’t, then why not have a single unified web front (which makes it more like a distributed service) to reduce confusion for most normal users?
I think the unified webfront is a bit tough, I believe right now the instance will pull from other instances if someone on the instance your in is following something from their instance
But you can really be on any instance and follow stuff from everywhere else, the search needs a bit of work in cataloging everything so a tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ is really useful in finding communities
I would also like to shout out https://lemmyverse.net, it’s basically indexed every instance and every community (even minuscule instances like mine are counted), and I think it has a really good search and sorting function. Also, it does include KBin magazines, but you have to enable it in the settings menu in the upper right part of the screen.
I feel like having a preference kind of defeats the point?
I thought they were supposed to be interchangeable?
It’s the communities yours supposed to care about.
The instance preference can be important if you look at the Local Communities timeline. Niche instances will usually have more communities relevant to that niche. However, with current user distribution most users are either on Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml.
A Federated space where this more apparent is on Mastodon. I joined SFBA,social because it is local to me (San Francisco Bay Area, California, US). The Local Timeline is all users on the instance. As a good proportion of them are from the area I can learn about local events/projects/news.
That’s always been the burning question for me. Why choose one over the other? What kind of attributes should I look at to do informed comparisons? Like server uptime, number of users, which instances they’ve federated with (or not federated with)…
And how and where can I see all this in one place? If it’s truly interchangeable, which it really isn’t, then why not have a single unified web front (which makes it more like a distributed service) to reduce confusion for most normal users?
Lemmy.world is noticeably slower and prone to have issues compared to the smaller instances for me.
the instance I’m on seems to be performant enough :)
I think the unified webfront is a bit tough, I believe right now the instance will pull from other instances if someone on the instance your in is following something from their instance
But you can really be on any instance and follow stuff from everywhere else, the search needs a bit of work in cataloging everything so a tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ is really useful in finding communities
I would also like to shout out https://lemmyverse.net, it’s basically indexed every instance and every community (even minuscule instances like mine are counted), and I think it has a really good search and sorting function. Also, it does include KBin magazines, but you have to enable it in the settings menu in the upper right part of the screen.
That is awesome! Thanks!
No problem, I use it all the time, it’s honestly vital for small instances like mine.