Asklemmy

I picked my regional one (technically also better for latency)

Lemmy.world initially cause I didn't like the overbearing moderation and locked communities of beehaw.org and the developers of lemmy.ml. Kbin seems to be great and I prefer its timeline / sorting, I just wish it was a bit more polished with magazine syncing and certain UI features, but that should come with time.

Knowing that Beehaw and Lemmy.ml were overloaded, I chose the next biggest one in my country at the time, which was Lemmy.one.

funny domain name

I'm on lemmy.ca because I'm Canadian.

Kbin has my favorite interface from the federated sites I've seen, and the developer seems like a decent dude.

I read the rules for a bunch of US-based Lemmy instances, as I wanted one with low latency -- if I'm going to be seeing the whole Fediverse through it, I want it to be peppy -- and I'm in the US. Many kind of took what I'd call a censorship-heavy position from the get-go -- like, creating a safe space for LGBT users or something was the highest priority.

There was one Dutch Lemmy instance that specifically mentioned free speech, but I was hunting for something with good latency, and pinging it with mtr had relatively-high latency.

There was a US Pleroma instance (IIRC freespeechextremist.com or something like that) that mentioned free speech. Pleroma, I understand, can federate with lemmy, and IIRC its default max comment size is longer. Unfortunately, browsing it without registering seemed that most of it seemed to be racist. I'd like a platform that doesn't try, as a top priority, to shut down everyone who is racist or otherwise offensive instancewide, but also not to drop into stuff that's just racism.

One thing that I did notice, skimming the content on said rather-racist server, was that they highlighted a Lemmy dev saying that he actively wanted to make it difficult for right-wingers to use the Lemmy platform. That didn't sit well with me at all -- I don't want to try to be using a platform that is actively opposed to right-wingers, nor to be in conflict with the developers of the platform on the matter, as it could lead to friction down the line. I also wasn't enthralled with the fact that Lemmy had a slur filter by default (though I'll concede that I don't know whether kbin does or not).

Kbin.social had rules that didn't from the get-go heavily talk about trying to restrict users and also wasn't purely serving up objectionable stuff. I tried it and discovered the fact that it had support for both Twitter-style microblogging and Reddit-style functionality, unlike Lemmy's focus on just Reddit functionality. I am most interested in Reddit-style functionality, but if I could get integrated microblogging, that'd be even better. Hence, I stuck with kbin.social, and so far, it's been unexpectedly good. There are a few UI quirks (e.g. the comment field is at the bottom of the page rather than the top), but people provided userscript fixes for that and other differences from Reddit within hours of me showing up. I'm broadly very happy with the UI -- the decisions made are basically what I would have liked to see from Reddit. Has a dark mode, though I use Dark Reader, essentially making it unnecessary.

I don't totally understand the kbin.social infrastructure -- I have low latency to kbin.social with mtr, but I don't know if that means that that's just some kind of Cloudflare-based frontend server in the US and the backend is located in Poland, where the developer is, or what. He does have a note currently in the sidebar referring to a "server room", which makes me think that he is physically near at least some of the infrastructure.

I just picked lemmy.one mostly at random, but also in part because it advertised itself as well regulated but also not heavily populated and thus prone to crashing with the recent influx of reddfugees.

Seems to work okay, but I can't create a community without admin approval and the instance also disallows downvoting, and I'm not a big fan of that at all, but I'll give it a while longer and see.

I'm still finding it a challenge to find the balance of communities that interest me I used to have. There's an awful lot of meta chatter about the site itself from new users that, while I understand, gets rather annoying when it takes up the whole feed. So it's definitely an adjustment, resulting in me using it less than I did my old haunts, but in the meantime I've gotten a lot more reading done than I used to, so I've got that going for me.

Lemmy.world: because it was the top result on Google and I neither knew about the other servers nor remembered my experiences with Mastodon.

Probably going to stay here anyway.

Mostly out of laziness

I chose kbin.social because of the alleged tankie issues at Lemmy. I didn't know enough about the fediverse to realise though that only a handful of Lemmy instances were included in the "warning" I'd heard about, so I looked to kbin instead.

Based on what I've seen from the admin here, though, I'm confident I'm in the right instance. He seems like an honest, stand-up dude who genuinely believes in all the best things the fediverse seems to be capable of

I'm self-hosting my own Lemmy instance, but I might switch to self-hosting kbin instead. I'm just unsure whether it's possible to migrate comments and posts from Lemmy to kbin :/

Sticking with BeeHaw for their community (usually browse local only) and now Kbin for the wider fediverse. I'd use Fedia.io over kbin.social (to put less strain on Kbin.social) but fedia.io isn't federating perfectly yet and seems to have image issues. I'm sure @Jerry will have it running smooth soon enough and I'll probably migrate my Kbin/fediverse-wide browsing there.

I figured my instance would make it easier to satisfy my requirement to tell everyone I use Arch, btw.

I chose Kbin because at the time I went searching it was the only option that was working/responsive haha.

Feddit.de because the guys at R/de linked to it

I used Lemmy for a while but now I am planning to exclusively use kbin. It appears to be way more mature project and is infinitely better UI/UX wise than Lemmy. Moreover it's a project maintained by a fellow Polander and not a bunch of tankies.

Kbin because it was the first one that actually let me register and didn't freeze

Kbin.social has a good interface, a few userscripts to customize it as I please, and it was the first one listed on the website that was in english lol.