Edit: thanks everyone for the suggestions!
Do keep them coming as it might be helpful for others who come across this, since it seems quite a few users are (understandably) bleeding from lemmy.world these days, like myself

I was looking for a solid instance to move to, but I'm getting burned out from trying to find the perfect instance that:

is based in a country with reasonable privacy reputation (if it still fits the bill, outside Europe too is fine)
allows creating communities without admin approval (I'm willing to try getting into one of those too if needed, hopefully it would be accepting of creating niche communities though)
doesn't defederate indiscriminately

The tool I used is lemmyverse.net but it seems the filtering isn't working great, or I just don't understand it, e.g. I filter by Italian language and the only Italian instance I know (feddit.it) doesn't show up, while a slew of irrelevant ones is listed (Lemmy Português is there??)

Sorry if I sound so needy, maybe I'm just overthinking it, since posts are public and indexable by anyone. Do say so, if I should chill out and just pick one of the usual ones like lemm.ee etc.

P.S. I would love to self-host, but I'm currently not able to either, I don't have enough technical expertise.

all 30 comments

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[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

discuss.tchnics.de is quite lenient when it comes to defederation, only defederating instances that host content illegal under German law (CP, Nazi shit) and blatant calls for violence (Nazi shit) or massive spamming. Based in Germany so somewhat decent privacy (still in the 14 eyes). Main languages are English and German, but others are permitted.

Keep in mind that Lemmy as a whole provides very little privacy, with any instance being able to log almost all activity.

Also, images are not proxies by default so you can do this:

An image that tells you where you live based on your GeoIP location

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

I joined yesterday, very happy with it so far!

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 year ago

Sopuli.xyz has been serving me nicely!

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

feddit.nl also exists. Haven't seen any outages there except during server upgrades.

lemmy.world's admin Dutch, but I think you may be looking for smaller servers.

[–] z3n0x@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

feddit.de is home <3

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As per standard procedure:

Sprich Deutsch, du Hurensohn!

[–] z3n0x@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

Ze saym proseedjah ess ev’ree yeer.

[–] gelberhut@lemdro.id 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Freddie.de is a solid choice. But if you want to create an generic, english-speaking community think twice. I saw many people assume that all community on Freddie.dr are regional. To the level that some wanted to block whole instance because they were not interested in Germany local topics.

Another question: what kind of privacy protection do you expect from a Lemmy instance? Cannot think about anything private here.

[–] z3n0x@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Definitely. Am German living abroad, so it’s a great instance for keeping up with local stuff.

As for privacy, I don’t expect anything to be private anywhere on the internet. But for a lemmy instance I’d hope that the admins are a) running it on secure infrastructure (firewalled, etc.) and b) they’re not just handing off email addresses to the biggest bidder.

[–] gelberhut@lemdro.id 1 points 1 year ago

Definitely. Am German living abroad, so it’s a great instance for keeping up with local stuff.

Then feddit.de sounds like a best choice for you :). BTW, you do not need to have an account on feddit.de to subscribe and participate any community "hosted" there. So keeping up with local stuff is relatively instance independent (but there are nuances, still :( )

As for privacy, I don’t expect anything to be private anywhere on the internet. But for a lemmy instance I’d hope that the admins are a) running it on secure infrastructure (firewalled, etc.) and b) they’re not just handing off email addresses to the biggest bidder.

I see. For me this sounds like security, rather then privacy. Anyways, I assume that feddit.de meets your criteria again - it is hosted in Germany and, as far as I remember, says that follows German laws (what covers "reasonable" security/privacy requirement).

[–] Reborn2966@feddit.it 6 points 1 year ago

feddit.de and feddit.it

the German one is pretty big.

the italian one "require" you to speak Italian.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 1 year ago

My instance, https://lemmings.world, fits all of that! Servers in Germany, you can create communities and all defederations are evaluated based on how it affects the instance's users.

[–] lily33@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

AFAIK lemm.ee fits all your requirements, what don't you like about it?

~~Edit: Maybe I'm wrong. It's run by Estonians, but looking up its IP, it point to the US, so maybe it's not hosted in the EU.~~

[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Our frontend is globally distributed (so if you're in the US, you get it from a US server), but the backend server and user data are hosted in the EU.

[–] mhz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for clarifying, I'm also considering migrating from lemmy.world and I'm considering lemm.ee, would you recommend that for someone located in north africa (Morocco)? Will i get latency problems? My last concern is should I worry about it degenerating (i still dont get exactly how instances work)?

[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think latency should be pretty decent thanks to our global CDN, but I think in the end you should just try it out and compare it to some other instances to get the best picture.

[–] mhz@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for having me, I will look how to migrate my lemmy.world account to lemm.ee

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lemmy.wtf is hosted on my own hardware in Denmark. I do require users to first request a community, before it gets created though.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 2 points 1 year ago

The most hygge instance :)

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

That makes sense

[–] pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lemmy.blahaj.zone

[–] QuazarOmega@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't understand why you were downvoted, though maybe adding more info about it would be useful (server location, etc.)

[–] pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

sweden. we have best 196 and the blahaj c/

[–] QuazarOmega@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

More blåhaj? I'm sold!

[–] Hank@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Can someone hook me up with shitty Balkan memes? I love to watch them talk shit about each other but I guess they're probably not the kind of crowd that ends up on Lemmy.

[–] Teabow49@jlai.lu 1 points 1 year ago

jlai.lu is a French based instance on OVh. But mostly in French.

[–] Tibert@compuverse.uk 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know about the privacy in UK, but privacy on Lemmy is... Pretty much inexistent.

Tho maybe the email Adresses could maybe be stored privately somehow.

My instance compuverse.uk runs most of the time. Tho the servers are not giant, and there was already an issue where the storage filled up completely before an upgrade had to be made.

Tho now it would be running on a separate storage dedicated server which may allow for more storage.

Also the rules on this instance makes it pretty much compatible with every other instance and so would avoid the defederation by other instances. (please just don't put porn or gore in the all).

[–] thecam@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

It will seem there are quite a few instances called feddit with the country level TLD. Such as feddit.de, feddit.uk