I joined Beehaw early on when things where a lot quieter because I liked what they were trying to do (and back then there were only like two instances, and I didn't want to put more load on lemmy.ml).

Joined sh.itjust.works to make a community after the sysadmin just casually walked up with a huge server, which is a level of swagger I can get behind. I've since moved to this as my "main" account since Beehaw defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works (which sucks, but is understandable).

May move again to pawb.social at some point, although that means people will know something about me. :P

Edit: And now pawb.social has defederated with sh.itjust.works... I'm getting more and more tempted to just roll my own personal instance just for me...

Thought about switching over, with zero knowledge of this platform, clicked random link in reddit thread and it was lemmy.world. turns out it's populated and stable.

I initially used reddthat.com because I've already tried 5 different instances and the sign up doesnt work. Then I remembered about the piracy community, so i switched over to lemmy.dbzer0.com, a pirate heaven. Feels like home. 😎🏴‍☠️

I think kbin.social is a bit more free speech. I want less moderation. Lemmy has easy tools to use to block users and communities I find offensive so if something really offends me it’s easy to block. I prefer to control it rather than having some petty mods play king with what I’m allowed to see.

If anyone has any good suggestions for other free speech instances I’d love to hear!

For the meme.

I chose programming.dev because i am a programmer and developer.

I tend to hang in indie game development subreddits and didn't want to have to deal with confrontational trolls on a regular basis, so programming.dev felt like a relatively safe choice since it's neither a super large server or a general-purpose one. I just wanna make lil' games and have little patience for those lacking in empathy and maturity.

I'm a network engineer and love self hosting, so I put up my own node to try to give back.

No one is using it but me yet, but it's there 😁

Joined sh.itjust.works since it's located in North America, has open registration, and the admin sounds like he knows what he's doing running a server. I've stayed 'cause it's been stable and I like the admin's vibe. It and lemmy.world seem to have become the main large "general purpose" instances since they both have open registration.

I also have an account on kbin that I'm not using much at the moment. I think that site has lots of future potential, though.

lemmy.world is more open and performant than lemmy.ml and Beehaw.

I chose lemmy.world after lemmy.ml closed their registration. Just glad I made my account somewhere.

lemmy.world seemed reputable with a straightforward domain name, and no out-of-the-ordinary policies.

I run a Mastodon server and Lemmy started to grow, happened to find a cool domain so here we are

feddit.de because it was made for german potatoes like me

I chose kbin, loved the integration with mastodon

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 landed at vlemmy.net. I tried to register at a few bigger ones that gave infinite circles. By the time I got to vlemmy I wasn't really being too picky anymore, I was just trying to figure out if the problem was me or overloading.

A nice side effect of landing there is that some of my very few subscriptions are on beehaw, and we haven't been defederated.

My current instance has a bunch of sports communities, and typically the first thing i like to look at when i was on reddit were the sports subs. I was previously on beehaw but they kind of shut themselves off from some of other big communities so i migrated off

I used Lemmy for a while but now I am planning to exclusively use kbin. It appears to be a 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.

I was looking for a furry one. Found pawb.social and yiffit. Stuck with the one that had nsfw. They both are Lemmy instances