I joined this one because I just followed the obvious ways to sign up after looking up what Lemmy was about. I didn’t know about instances until I tried to sign in and had to find mine.
Is there a way to mess up making an alt by joining an unfit instance? From what I’ve read, it doesn’t really matter outside of an instance going down and your profile going with it.
Any help is appreciated.
I think I should probably just keep the alt in this general instance. I’m not looking for political talk or niche interest spaces. I just want to find a consistent and dependable place for mainstream topics.
Yeah, that is likely to work. And you’ll get basically all of the same content no matter where. Some defederate the Tankie Triad, which results in better content.
I chose mine mainly based on it running on PieFed instead of Lemmy, because PieFed has a little more features and a nicer UI. And then secondly by this being hosted in the Nordic countries, where it is legal to say that genocides are always a bad thing. If there was something that defederated from the Tankie Triad, but fulfills the other two requirements I’d absolutely make the switch to that :)
I do love the UI. I tend to wing stuff, so I’ll just go ahead with this.
Umm, any recs on how to get started before I stumble in the dark?
Started with what? :)
With making an account there.
Well, there’s still the problem of finding an instance ;)
For choosing my own instance, I’ve found this tool very handy: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list .
Click the top of the column for uptime percentage. The ones with 100% are probably a bad idea, because that means they’ve never been updated. Then maybe take a look at where the server is located. If something looks good by these statistics, click the name of the instance to check the server version number. You generally won’t want an instance that lags far behind others in the version number – that indicicates a lazy server admin. It’s also good to read the instance description.
Also, note that this listing currently conflates PieFed and PyLova, even though they are now two separate codebases. They still look and feel about the same because PyLova was forked from PieFed such a short time ago.
Can I use the same email for different instances?
Yes. The two instances are completely separate servers and don’t know about each other. Also, remember to take backups of your data regularly in case that your instance goes down.
Go to Settings, then “Import & Export” and press the “Export” button. You’ll get a file that you can upload to another instance and keep going almost as if nothing had happened.
Oh, that solves the biggest issue for me. I don’t want a bunch of new emails. Thanks.
piefed.social isn’t very big on the political side last time I checked, that’s why I chose feddit.online instead, which is also a piefed instance. I highly reccomend piefed instances, or KBin/MBin, because the Lemmy instances in contrast are developed by those Tankies.