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Really the biggest effect your home instance has is who you're defederated with. Your instance admin can choose to defederate with an instance at any time, blocking your communication with that instance.
For most instances this isn't a real problem because nobody defederates without a clear reason, but in some cases like Beehaw users were upset that the admin decided to defederate with instances they use.
I recently signed up and didn’t know where to park myself. So I got accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org.
From lemmy.world I’ve added to a few of the beehaw subs that I’m subscribed to there. But I can tell you I see different content in my lemmy.world feed.
Don’t know why. A delay in the content making it over from beehaw to lemmy? But my home feed certainly looks different in both (even subscribing as closely is I can to the same feeds).
So for now I’ll stick with both and see how the dust settles.
It's because Beehaw defederated with most of the popular instances. Their communities still exist but none of the posts will come through to Lemmy World and vice versa, they can't see any new posts in Lemmy World communities.
IMO just stick to lemmy world and avoid beehaw communities (they're effectively dead for us) unless you want a "safe space" and live in the small Beehaw instance.
That's a little harsh. I was here before beehaw defederated, and the content over there was high quality. Some bad actors spoiled it for everyone over here.
Hopefully they'll be back once the mod tools for cross-instance content management improve.
No need to sneer at them, it was a community decision. You can still interact wth the content on most other instances than .world and .itjust.works
I think they were being a bit unreasonable in expecting everyone else to have verified sign-ups. It would be prohibitively difficult to verify all of the users especially with the recent influx.
If the other instances had tried that I think Lemmy would be dead on arrival. It would have taken so long to verify each user that most people would have got bored by the time they're approval came through and would never have even bothered signing in.
Honestly, it's not that I find a reason in particular to dislike Beehaw users or their content, I just really got tired of weirdly aggressive philosophies regarding content discoverability and community sizes on Mastodon, and I can't have that shit started again and I know there's ways that it might once people get defensive either way.
Hearing Beehaw start to go down the path, just makes me mentally check out and choose to ignore them. I'm sure that whatever or another can be said of them, but my statements will be "oh, those don't matter anymore, join these other ones and leave them alone" and, honestly, it's probably the effect of the Beehaw admins intended as well.
But I still see some posts at eg gaming@beehaw.org from lemmy.world. And comments and votes. But maybe 20% of what I see if I’m looking from my beehaw account.
Could these be crossposts and comments from non-beehaw users? Ie stuff that hasn’t originated at beehaw?
So basically anything posted in defederated communities won't be federated. So someone on Lemmy World posting on Beehaw communities can only be seen by Lemmy World users and nobody else. Everyone should find alternative communities instead.
or you can join a smaller instance that beehaw has not defederated and interact with both beehaw and lemmy.world communities
Same here. One when I want to keep it polite and the other when I want a little more freedom.
IMO there's nothing to keep in mind on everyday use. But these things are things to consider when deciding what to use in a mindful manner.
Some instances have a tight thematic focus and, if you want to create communities, you should probably do it on an instance where it will be on-topic. That's the reason my main account is on midwest.social instead of the first instance I signed up for: slrpnk.net has a tight focus on environmental sustainability.
Another important thing to consider is governance and privacy/security. You're trusting the admins to not missuse your data, to not read your messages, and that they agree with you on how federation should work (ex. Who they choose to federate / defederate with). There's also the side of donations and how upfront they are about costs, where they choose to store your data, etc.
If an instance is being run transparently like a non profit, with good governance and regular updates, then that's amazing. Not all instances can do that
If your instance goes down, you lose all you posts. vlemmy.net was an instance and they just vanished recently. lemmy.fmhy.ml just disappeared yesterday, I couldn't find much info besides a post vaguely mentioning that their domain name got seized by the Mali government (idk why). Besides being shut down, also due to federation issues. beehaw.org has defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, meaning you can't really interact with each other for the most part. Some instances like lemmygrad.ml and exploding-heads.com are disliked by many instance owners due to politics and got defederated so they are sorta on their own island.
Edit: Well... techically, your posts aren't lost, you can still find them in other instances. But your images are gone since images do not get federated (unless someone made an archive) and you lost the account and any direct messages, and you have to manually check if you want to see any comments to a post that you posted before it got shut down. Just a huge inconvenience.
Former vlemmy user here, was very miffed when it vanished without a trace and with no warning.
Honestly, I think Lemmy needs something equivalent to the Mastodon Server Covenant.
I dont have my account on lemmy.ml because my opinions do not align with theirs.
Also choosing an instance with servers close to you is a plus as well for loading times
I do wish there was a convenient way to move your account from one instance to another.
When I chose my instance I didn't really know what I was doing so I just picked something at random, and unfortunately the instance I picked isn't exactly physically close to where I lived so the load times are a bit slow. Although they're still faster than Reddit so 🤷
You can use this to easily move subscribed communities and bookmarks
Mastodon has a method of migrating from one instance to another. So, I feel it should be possible for Lemmy as well, and should eventually arrive
You could also be in a position where the insurance just disappears.
I joined lemmy.fmhy.ml which has now disappeared, from what I gather they received a take down notice.
So whilst but important which instance in general being with a reputable one can matter.
Crap, sorry to hear that
why were they taken down?
Not entirely sure but it was a piracy focused instance so best guess is they recieved a takedown request.
Achso ok. That sucks.
So when this happens, you lose all of your posts/ comments/bookmarks?
It matters. The admins mater. They control federation, styling, upgrades, security, performance, and admin-level moderation things. Also, some instances try and cater to certain communities (e.g. lemmy.zip tries to focus on gaming and tech).
In general it's not that important but there are a few considerations. There have been instances that just disappeared so that isn't impossible. There could be instances that yours is defederated from and that would affect what content you get. Also when searching for communities you might not see things you would be interested in because nobody on your instance has searched for it yet. The first successful search for a community requires you to know the actual community address and then that causes it to federate with your home community so if you just search for a word, like cats, you will only see cat communities that someone on your server is already subscribed to or already searched for.
requires you to know the actual community address?
Can you explain that more? What does a community address look like and how would I access one once I know it?
Full disclosure I'm not an expert on this but it would look something like !cats@lemmy.world but I'll go check a community and get a real address for you.
Edit: that is a real community address so that is what you would need to type into the search the first time, then wait like 5 minutes for it to federate then search for it again and it will come up now.
Edit 2: since you're on lemmy.world you're going to have access to a lot of content without doing anything special since it's a huge instance.
The only way it matters is if/when it is defederated by/from other instances.
That being said, some may or may not be more reliable than others, but that's a separate issue
That’s not the only way. Smaller instances will have very different All feeds because All is just an aggregate of your Instance-mates.
One thing that might not be obvious is that the All feed is different too, as it only shows posts from communities someone on the instance has subscribed to. But since there are ways to search communities across instances, it isn't really a big deal. Unless you're on an instance of one or two people maybe.
Federation and moderation are probably where the instance matters most. Also, the matter of who runs the instance is kind of important considering stability and longevity of the instance. (mine for example will probably be gone within a month once I break something)
If it goes down you can't get on your regular account, but I made a backup account on another server for when that happens.
A backup account like a second account? Or does your main account back up to the other one?
Like just a second account, I can't be bothered to do anything fancy.
I don't know, but I keep trying to comment on posts federated from other instances and half the time I get some obscure error and it fails, and it's fucking irritating.
I hosted my own for now :3
Quick plug for any "The Big Lebowski" fans, join us at https://lemmy.world/c/achievers@lebowski.social
Hi there! The links in your text lead away from the user's instance, here are fixed links that stay on each user's instance: !achievers@lebowski.social
Largely, I'd say it depends on the sort of engagement that you're looking for. I went with mine because I'm passionate about FOSS and think that, long-term, it's only sustainable by organizations that do not have a profit motive.
Sometimes syncing of comments/posts in communities between instances can be delayed or missing. I noticed some communities on Lemmy.world would be missing posts if I view them from my Lemmy.ca account.
However, these issues aren't as prevalent for me as they were a month ago. I imagine it's been better after the upgrades.