I owned a funny domain

I'm hosting my own. I had a free server with 9GB RAM and 99GB disk space, and it was only running my Mastodon server until now. I like the freedom to do what I want with the server :)

I want to be in control over my own data. So I spun up my own instance

It has the word world in the name, sounds bigger.

I was going to choose sopuli.xyz but you need to give them a reason to why you want there and I never heard back from them and logging in does nothing, so I assume I was not selected. I say it would be fair if there was some message to go f myself so that I wouldn't be held in eternal limbo.

So I chose lemmy.world as it's a general purpose instance and immediate registry.

I have has a journey through a few instances.

I first applied to Lemmy.ml because I was interested in open source. I also applied at Lemmy.one and Beehaw because they were recommended on join-lemmy.

I got accepted at Beehaw. Then they defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.it. Stayed on Beehaw for a while but found a few communities on world that I couldn’t join, so decided to sign up to world.

World was having performance issues and I realised I could no longer interact with the Beehaw communities and people I had started talking with.

Then found lemm.ee I like the name, it hadn’t been defederated by any other instances, had good up time, was on the latest Lemmy code, and the admin seemed to know what they were doing, so joined that one. I don’t see myself moving again any time soon.

Lemmy.ml was requesting people register on other instances, and lemmy.one stepped up to fill the void.

But when people ask me what instance to sign up for, I tell them lemmy.world. it doesn't really matter, but being based in a bigger instance reduces the friction of finding communities.

For some reason I couldn't join lemmy.world and few other popular instances, be it because of technical issues, load, idk. I joined sh.itjust.works because I wanted to check fediverse before I commit to host my own instance, which I probably will at some point.

Others did not exist back than.

Lemmy.ca felt like a natural home as an IRL Canadian resident. I like the variety of content and the moderation seems good so far.

I have two. I have this one (lemmy.ml) as my broad-access instance. My other is lemmygrad, but as that is a bit more widely blocked I keep this one still. That one is used for most of my politics, and this one is my more general interest. It's kind of nice to have different communities died to different user registrations.

As to why those two in particular, I am a Marxist-Leninist so...yeah.

I picked Lemmy.world because I wanted a fairly large one that will likely maintain support.

I saw a local instance for new Zealanders and joined.

lemmy.ml was the only general purpose instance when I opened my account. There were only two instances back then - lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml

I frequently see Stux on mastodon, and I think they're a good person so I decided to choose one of their instances when choosing a Lemmy server.

I use lemmy.ml because i found it has a large user-base. I also like programming.dev and ideally i would like to see all the posts from the one and the other instance into one :)

It federates with the servers that have some stuff I want access to on them, and it also has rules against being a huge douche. And it's supported by Jerboa.

That's pretty much it. Mix of convenience and what passes for my moral scruples.

Initially made an account with the instance opened after my country's subreddit made the shift, but on Jerboa trying to look at other instance content was really rough.

So I joined here since I enjoy the content, and raise the black flag every so often.

Tried the bee but did not get any notification I was accepted. Fortunately saw programming.dev pop on my feed and they accepted my request.

Good thing as well that I found all of my favorite programming languages on the server.

Lemmy.world was the only server where I could make an account during the busier days of reddit immigration.