Is there any difference between Lemmy instances? If so, what are they? How do people choose an instance? How does one decide one instance over another?
On a related topic, do you have any opinions about specific instances? Not trying to start a beef battle or anything. Just curious in learning more.
I personally found a “service” about Lemmy instances about a year ago, with half a dozen instances “highlighted”, advising picking a popular but not too popular one, so I chose the one I use now (though I use Jerboa, extremely rarely the website). Now, I’m curious about learning more and seeing what other options could offer, if anything (not that I ever had any problem with Lemmy Today). Having an alternative could also be useful if there is ever an outage in one instance.
Mander.xyz for science
Beehaw.org for being nice
Dozens of smaller mainstream-ish instances.
I’d like to see more specialization by area of interest. The monolithic style like lemmy.world replicates many of the problems of reddit, which we avoided with its predecessors, interest-specific forum sites.
True… could you please elaborate about Beehaw? I would like to hear more about them.
“What is Beehaw”: https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/core-principles/what-is-beehaw/
TL;DR: Beehaw.org is intentionally curated and moderated to try and maintain a “nice” environment free of aggression and trolling.
The influx of Reddit refugees last year was a bit of a shock to their system. The Beehaw admins have floated the idea of leaving Lemmy entirely.
We defederated from a few of the larger servers early on because of moderation problems. It’s a bit quieter without world but still very nice!