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?

  • goldenlocks@lemmy.world
    23·
    2 days ago

    +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

    • how_we_burned@lemmy.zip
      1·
      1 day ago

      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.

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    14·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • Corporal_Punishment@feddit.ukEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • mathemachristian [he/him]
      7·
      2 days ago

      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

    • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      Okay, so it matters for a few reasons.

      1. 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.

      2. 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.

      3. 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.

  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    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

      • FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
        7·
        2 days ago

        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?

        • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          I prefer that the community have some say in deciding what comments are objectionable rather than relying on mods for every little thing.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
            3·
            1 day ago

            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.

          • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
            5·
            2 days ago

            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

          • FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
            3·
            2 days ago

            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.

            • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              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.

              • FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
                2·
                2 days ago

                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.

      • Imaginary_Stand4909English
        5·
        10 hours ago

        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.

      • Flames5123@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        9·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • TwigletSparkleEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          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.)

        • FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
          2·
          2 days ago

          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.

      • linux_penguin
        4·
        2 days ago

        Ah, well that would explain why Voyager kept giving errors every time I tried

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          8·
          2 days ago

          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.

        • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
          2·
          2 days ago

          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

        • hector@lemmy.today
          1·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • gwl [he/him]English
            9·
            2 days ago

            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.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
    80·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • everett@lemmy.ml
      19·
      3 days ago

      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?

      • Cantaloupe877@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        7·
        3 days ago

        It’s trust and uptime data so it seems. Pick the server you think is most trustworthy and will stand the longest.

    • Cantaloupe877@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 days ago

        Lemmy.world is actually defederated from some larger instances, and many smaller ones defederate it for being too dominating.

      • testaccount372920@piefed.zipEnglish
        19·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • everett@lemmy.ml
          11·
          3 days ago

          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.

          • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            8·
            3 days ago

            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.

        • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
          4·
          3 days ago

          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

      • PosiePoser@feddit.org
        8·
        3 days ago

        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.

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
        7·
        3 days ago

        There are tools nowadays that share communities around to smaller instances through bot accounts that auto subscribe.

        https://lemmy-federate.com/

        It also makes it easier when you create a community, now it will automatically show up on most instances.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
        5·
        3 days ago

        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.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
    54·
    3 days ago

    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.

    https://nodebb.fediverse.observer/dailystats

    • spaduf@slrpnk.net
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • Carrot@lemmy.today
      9·
      3 days ago

      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

    • The_Almighty_Walrus@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 days ago

      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

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      9·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • Flames5123@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
      27·
      3 days ago

      hexbear, lemmygrad as well. hexbear make themselves sound"cute" to hopefully trick people into engaging in thier instance, when in fact they are tankies.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
        11·
        2 days ago

        Hexbear is openly communist, it doesn’t “try to sound cute to trick people.” That’s genuinely the community, tons of queer communists.

      • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        10·
        3 days ago

        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

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          9·
          2 days ago

          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.

            • FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
              7·
              2 days ago

              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.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
              5·
              1 day ago

              “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.