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?
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.
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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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.
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.
Lemmy.world is actually defederated from some larger instances, and many smaller ones defederate it for being too dominating.
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
On a slightly different note NodeBB is very cool and worth checking out. Did those unaware it’s a Goodreads, Letterboxd, Steam Reviews, etc all rolled into one.
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I also recommend lemmy.zip or piefed.zip
Seconding .zip! I haven’t had any qualms with it since joining a few months ago
Personally I’d really like to see more servers physically located in privacy and free-speech friendly places like Switzerland and Iceland (for example). I’m not sure why you’d want to have your social media hosted anywhere else.
Recommend:
Avoid:
- Lemmy.ml (Tankie fascist koolaid. Unless you enjoy being gaslit and manipulated similar to Trump and his fascist thugs, this should be avoided like the bubonic plague)
- Lemmy.world (sorry guys but seriously please reconsider accepting literally everyone for users; it’s crazy how much spam and nonsense is coming from your instance)
You may disagree with communists, but we are by no means fascists. Fascism is inherently tied to protecting private property and capitalism, communists oppose that and seek to collectivize production and distribution.
Tankies aren’t really communists if you actively defend Putin, Iran and modern-day Russia
Just a warning: Piefed has a lot of shady built in hidden karma. Like you posting “this” or a gif only detracts from your karma. They also block you from downvoting if you downvote more than you upvote. It’s not really free speech at all.
I mainly dislike lemmy.world because it’s Americans owning the place like usual.
Ironically LW is run by a European team (the top admin is Dutch), but still communities like !politics@lemmy.world are only for US news…
hexbear, lemmygrad as well. hexbear make themselves sound"cute" to hopefully trick people into engaging in thier instance, when in fact they are tankies.
Hexbear is openly communist, it doesn’t “try to sound cute to trick people.” That’s genuinely the community, tons of queer communists.
Fyi, you might to clarify that new users should avoid hexbear and lemmygrad.
If someone only skims through the comments, yours can read as an endorsement, especially since the user you replied to had endorsements at the top of their comment
If people are communists, I see no reason why they should avoid the communist instances. If you don’t like communists, wouldn’t you rather they be in instances you’re defederated with or can easily block? People can decide for themselves if they want to stay or not after checking an instance.
Of course, another user of lemmy.ml that can’t figure out the difference between tankies and communists. Why am I not surprised.
I’ve seen communists of every denomination get called tankies. I’ve seen progressive liberals get called tankies by zionists for supporting Palestine. I’ve seen anarchists get called tankies by liberals for saying the Uighur genocide is not real. I’m pretty sure I once saw a conservative get called a tankie by other conservatives for not being far right enough, but I can’t say I remember where.
My point is, it’s really not helpful to act like the word “tankie” actually has some agreed-upon meaning. If you’re generally on the left, some group of people out there will consider you a tankie. I guarantee that, it’s just a matter of waiting and seeing.
If you want to say that there are communists who are authoritarian and there are communists who aren’t say that instead, and we can have another conversation.
“Tankie” is just a pejorative for communists, it’s a strawman that essentially says that the Red Scare was correct, but that that’s a good thing. In reality, the ones called “tankies” have very reasonable views and reasons for supporting existing socialism, the label gets thrown to shut down discussion.
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!main@sh.itjust.works 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
Second for sh.itjust.works
I picked this server cause the name was funny and it was large enough that I expected not to run into small-server problems.
I stayed because I have not run into any small-server problems and our admin is a very cool guy.
Blahaj.zone we’re chill AF here
I don’t like that you can’t downvote, though.
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.)
People also just downvote stuff they disagree with. If you use the downvotes on a post or comment as the indicator of whether it’s correct or not you’ll just end up believing only the things the majority of the users believe are true, instead of using evidence or any kind of facts.
9 day old account on ml. Stop trolling
One day this account will be 2 years old and its posts will be recognized for their greatness. But until then, it’ll just be a sockpuppet troll account. Very sad.
I’ve only been outside of Hexbear (where there also are no downvotes) for a week and I hate having downvotes. Instead of people replying to something they disagree with with evidence and counterarguments, people just downvote and move on. They really shouldn’t be used to downvote comments people disagree with (because that just promotes groupthink), ideally they’d just be used to downvote spam and low effort stuff; but moderators can take care of that, so what’s the point?
I prefer that the community have some say in deciding what comments are objectionable rather than relying on mods for every little thing.
If something is objectional you should say something about it, it’s one thing for bots and spam, but if you see someone posting an unforced error, you should tell them they’re wrong
not to invoke leddit, but you should be able to communicate with other human beings
Okay, so the community should be able to reply to the objectionable comments with the reasons why they think they’re objectionable. All downvotes do is let people shut down the conversation without even thinking.
Sometimes comments are poor without being worthy of a conversation about it. The commenter can always ask if they see downvotes and are confused as to why.
In that situation those low value comments that aren’t explicitly rulebreaking just proceed to get no upvotes and are functionally the same as a comment that got downvoted. So there isn’t really any value gained from having downvotes in this scenario, while they provide negative value in other scenarios.
To be clear, one comment having 1-2 upvotes and a reply to it having a dozen or more upvotes gets that across just fine, it just requires the reply in the first place.
Ah, well that would explain why Voyager kept giving errors every time I tried
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.
OHHH THAT’S why Voyager gives me an error.
Sigh, these are the things that might drive people away from Lemmy and Piefed. Lemmy devs are tankies, Piefed devs are weirdly puritanical, and instances won’t tell you they don’t allow downvotes.
I really wish Blahaj was federated with Hexbear :(
Are you though? Not as enlightened as you may think.
Are you high?
Responding to someone saying ‘you’re not as enlightened as you think’ with some drug sitgmatisation, on point
come down from your ivory tower bud
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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
How is .blahaj.zone’s moderation dishonest?
you have never said why it’s not as they claim. How did blahaj lemmy hurt you?
Even for things we’re excited about, truncating the y-axis is never okay 😕
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.
I think the best thing is to choose one and hang around and if you like where you land then go forward but once you learn how to look them over and what makes them different then evaluate and decide on one and make a new account that becomes your main.
Sound advice
My own! I feel like I run it pretty well, I certainly trust myself with my data than others. But otherwise, id probably recommend lemmy.zip or piefed.social
I’m leaning towards running my own too.
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.
I had no idea this was a local instance. Neat!
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.
https://lemmy.sdf.org/ has some pretty unique content, even from the normal fediverse. I like the users there. See !funhole@lemmy.sdf.org and !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org
When its up peertube.wtf is great for discovering peertube videos. I use it to find things to post on !peertube@lemmy.world
I like to spend my time on piefed. Its my favorite “threadiverse” software atm. I spent snd contributed code to lemmy for about a year but jumped over to piefed. Its fun and fedi interop was better at the time.
For everything else fediverse.party for fun software and instances!
I would recommend use https://join-lemmy.org/ it suggest a generic instance and also lets search specific instances.
Hard to take that list seriously.
World is missing, and ML, Hexbear, and Lemmygrad are the top promoted servers. What a joke.
.world is missing because it’s way too big, and Grad is below other servers like dbzer0, sh.itjust.worlks, Blahaj.zone, Lemmy.ca, programming.dev, etc. Hex and .ml are up high because, like it or not, they are highly active non-.world instances.
What you have wrote is false, and you know it.
One that is not blocked by a lot of other instances…
