I’ve been noticing a lot of back and forth between instances, changes of stances etc. I was wondering if there is any place that just collects what each instance represents from a philosophical perspective. This would be great in helping people choosing an instance before they join, or later if they want to switch to another instance.

  • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 hour ago

    in reading through the comments I feel a sense of “lemmy pride” that instances have genuine, recognized flavors and that federation works as well as it does for the overwhelming majority of people. this really is the way, methinks. 👍

  • jimmy90@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 hours ago

    i wonder if anything could be gleaned from automated scanning of community names and descriptions and modlogs

  • Harvey656@lemmy.world
    30·
    21 hours ago

    I feel as if such a ‘list’ being public would only create more strife between instances. Not EVERYONE from .ml is a tankie, some people didn’t know when they signed up and just never left as an example.

    It would also be massively biased to whomever maintains the list. Not sure I’d trust such a thing.

    • grandel@lemmy.ml
      4·
      7 hours ago

      I created my account in 2020, waaay before the Reddit API thing. Back then there were only like three instances to pick from

        • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 hour ago

          nah. I have found .ml to be pretty opinionated but diverse since signing up. aside from some minor inter/intra instance strife, its been good.

          I think most people eventually get over themselves and recognize the social and technical usefulness of .ml - having a bleeding edge, well federated instance where you find the beehaws, worlds, hexbears and others is… interesting. the flavor of each instance really comes through and you can still curate your own feed as needed.

    • ApollosArrow@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      17 hours ago

      It would likely be manually curated by an individual asking the people that run the instances. It would hopefully not be interpreted.

      • Harvey656@lemmy.world
        9·
        18 hours ago

        I’m Sorry but philosophical perspectives can only be known through interpretation. Ask any two people what a communist is and you WILL get two different answers, obviously there will be many similarities between the two answers but the nuance will be different.

        All that being said…

        If this is something you really want, I’m sure it won’t be too hard to get ahold of the instance admins to get the answers you desire. And if you make a place, or community or website or whatever to host that information, we’ll, I’m sure it won’t be too hard.

  • rbn@sopuli.xyz
    17·
    22 hours ago

    I guess the instance doesn’t matter too much as you can interact with any content and people independent from your home instance. Personally, I’d recommend a medium-sized all-purpuse instance. Medium-sized because I think it’s important for the fediverse not to concentrate everything on one or twp major hosts and very small hobby projects are probably more likely to just disappear out of a sudden.

    • MHLoppy@fedia.io
      6·
      21 hours ago

      Instance does affect moderation policy though. For example, someone who likes the vibe of specific “controversial” instances like hexbear would likely find many instances to be dissatisfactory because many instances are defederated with it. Someone may also have strong preferences about “free speech vs safe space” kind of moderation.

      General-purpose medium-sized instance is probably “good enough” (especially if picking your first instance, with a willingness to migrate later if needed), but someone will feel more at home if their preferences more closely align with the instance they’re on. For example, beehaw users generally seem to love being on there from what I’ve seen, and I think they would feel less at home on most other instances.

      There’s also value in making use of an instance’s local feed in some cases (less so for most general-purpose instances though!). I participate in aussie.zone regularly, and at times it’s a pain to use from a remote instance. For example, if I want to submit a new post, I have to manually check several loosely-related communities to make sure it hasn’t already been posted to the instance (cross-posting intra-instance is not ideal imo). If I were a local instance user, I could just check the local feed, which most of the time I just end up doing anyway because it’s faster than checking several communities manually. It would definitely be easier for me in that regard if I just migrated there or had started there to begin with.

      • rbn@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        13 hours ago

        I see your point with moderstion policy (hexbear etc.).

        The aspect of local topics (aussie.zone), I see very critical for the fediverse. I see the same pattern here with the German-speaking communities on Lemmy. A huge part of them was historically hosted on feddit.de. The administrator of that instance lost interest in the project, downtimes soared and the instance is basically dead now. As an alternative, people founded feddit.org. Feddit.org is actively maintained right now but still the majority of the German content is focused on that instance. The communities AFAIK never grew again to the old size. If Feddit.org goes down as well one day (for whatever reason), I think chances are high that the German communities simply get lost as the frustratration grows everytime you start over again. Similarly, it would be a bad idea if every German was using the same German provider for their e-mails.

        Personally, I’d prefer if Australian, German and every other ‘bubble’ (Solarpunk, Veganism, …) would be more distrubuted across various instances. That makes the fediverse more resistent against outside attacks, internal conflicts, downtimes and less dependent on single instance administrators.

        • MHLoppy@fedia.io
          1·
          10 hours ago

          The decentralization is good if you can get the numbers high enough for the individual communities to be useful, but having them concentrated creates a mini network effect, where each user is automatically exposed to all of the local communities, which would be harder to seek out and find individually. So I think there’s tradeoffs, and mostly-centralized and mostly-decentralized community-instance pairing both have pros and cons.

      • ApollosArrow@lemmy.worldOP
        2·
        18 hours ago

        The reason I posted this was because I have been on .world and didn’t realize it’s run by people in Europe (wasn’t a thing I assumed I would need to know). Different countries will enforce different rules on their instances. The whole removing comments about jury nullification threw me off. I want to start building up some communities, but I’d rather at least my account be centered around an instance I can trust.

  • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    How and who would you compile such a list and what does it bring? I guess it would provide us with more entertainment watching the ensueing squabbles. eg I’m an aethiest, green, anarchist, cis, old white guy. If i had a bug up my arse, the beauty is I can start my own instance.

    That said, a lot of people, including myself most times, have zero interest in my views.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    9·
    20 hours ago

    I’m not aware of any. lemmyverse.net has one sentence ready per instance. But I doubt that’s enough detail.

    If you feel comfortable asking (and revealing what you’re interested in), you might get some recommendations from the people here.

    • MHLoppy@fedia.io
      3·
      21 hours ago

      Afaik lemmyverse gets the descriptions from the instances themselves? Publishing any “curated” description and having everyone agree on it would be… challenging for some instances.