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?
Anyone know why the recent spike? That’s not negligible.
Because reddit moderation has become utterly unbearable, insufferable bad.
I’ve been using BBSs, newsgroups, MIRC, ICQ, a million ass forums and social media for almost 40 years now.
I’ve never been banned from anywhere on the net (and before).
And yet in the last three months I’ve been temp banned 3 times on reddit. All for their AI moderation systems misunderstanding Australian colloquialisms as threatening violence.
It’s utter bullshit.
People are leaving reddit as a result.
https://lemmy.world/post/43035743/22099833 Apparently old forum software was updated to use the federation and all the old users got tallied up and added. Also people flocking from Reddit and X too.
Thanks
So, the instance you choose largely depends on two factors:
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your political stance.
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do you like porn?
.world has been treating me alright. After blocking hexbear and .
world.ml, I’m sitting pretty alright here in .world. I’d prefer piefed.world to lemmy.world, but the former didn’t exist when I made my account. I used to think of myself as a progressive liberal, but in current year the anarchists are making some pretty good points. Also, most of the porn communities I like I can subscribe to on this instance.EDIT: Block hexbear and .ml not . world
glorious fuck did I fuck something up
Why did you block . world if they’ve been treating you all right?
I’m sincerely curious for a few reasons
first of all .world is the only instance that would let me in after I tried multiple times joining numerous other instances that would just buffer forever when I was trying to register and they never sent me confirmation emails, .world was the only one that would let me in.
But now when I make posts and comments in .world communities, moderators have been removing my posts & comments, they say because I belong to.world 🤯
Please make this make sense.
And look, here we are in a .world community. Let’s see how long the moderators let this comment of mine remain 🙄
why did you block .world
What made you think I did that? I never claimed to have done so.
After blocking hexbear and .world,
i think I did a fuxky wucky
block hexbear and .ml
How are you seeing my comments, though? I’m on .ml
no Idea, that shouldn’t be a thing
Blocking instances blocks their communities, not their users. Further, Lemmy.world is already defederated from Hexbear, blocking it does nothing in that case.
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One that is not blocked by a lot of other instances…
+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
+1 Hexbear if you like increasingly abstracted inside jokes about owls and beans
Booo tankie bullshit
You have a🔻in your username. That makes you a “tankie” to a huge portion of the people who hate communists, too. We’re both going to get sent to the same camps.
dafuq? The red triangle is part of my lore, it’s for the book that I haven’t written
Wait, you don’t support Hamas?
Fuck all genocidal regiems. Does that need to be said explicitly?
Lol. These are the people calling you tankies
Since when was the Palestinian resistance to genocide genocidal themselves? What kind of hasbara is this?
Hamas is genocidal
me when I make shit up
Honestly I don’t think this person is saying Hamas is genocidal. I think he’s very confused and is really insistent that tankies love genocide, so he was trying to like, pre-move me. But as far as I can tell the implied genocidal regime he’s opposed to is China, not Hamas. Obviously that opens a whole other can of worms but he won’t reply to my last comment.
Well yeah it does, you’re on lemmy.world which sometimes has a lot of Zionist apologia. In most online political spaces, the🔻symbol is a reference to videos from Hamas where they would overlay a similar red triangle over an Israeli soldier/tank/military target before it gets hit.
I guess it’s still germane to my point, though. If you do think Hamas is cool because you hate the genocidal regime of Israel, that makes you a “tankie” or at least comparable to one in the eyes of most anticommunists. Functionally, the people who actually will fight “tankies” (as in communists) area also the people who will put you in a camp for being anti-zionist or having other left wing positions.
you’re reading too far into it my dude.
Fuck ALL genocidal regiems.
I use the red triangle specifically for my own fictional lore. Fuck everyone else ruining my day.
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.
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.
It doesn’t. Pick whatever instance and if another catches your eye make an account there as well. You don’t have to limit yourself to one account on one instance. I started on feddit.de, then lemm.ee now hexbear and use this account to see some posts I wouldn’t from hexbear since they have more of a safe space mentality than this instance
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^
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
.world is squeamish about upsetting corpos because they’re the biggest instance.
Hexbear, pretty chill community that is overtly pro-LGBTQ and inclusive of all kinds of leftists.
If I wanted to argue with tankies I’d just go back to Twitter
@RalphFurley @mathemachristian how though? It’s not like there’s anyone but bots there
As in Hexbear or Twitter? I don’t think there’s a lot of bots active on Hexbear. I think we have 3 total? There’s the Amber bot, the Volcel Police bot, and the one that replies to comments with twitter, youtube, and reddit links with alternative frontends.
booo tankie bullshit
😂
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
Blahaj.zone we’re chill AF here
I really wish Blahaj was federated with Hexbear :(
I don’t like that you can’t downvote, though.
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.
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.
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.
OHHH THAT’S why Voyager gives me an error.
Sigh, these are the things rhat 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.
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.
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.
Are you though? Not as enlightened as you may think.
you have never said why it’s not as they claim. How did blahaj lemmy hurt you?
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.
How is .blahaj.zone’s moderation dishonest?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
