Fled Reddit to join lemm.ee a few months ago. It was a glorious few months, and I hope the admins know how appreciated their work was.

I’m very sad but grateful that there was a place to go where I felt like I could speak freely, read, and share information that is being suppressed on other platforms.

I was wondering what recommendations people might have for any instances that are allowing new users, and seem to have found a good balance between avoiding disinformation/astroturfing/bad actors, without swinging too far in the opposite direction and potentially suppressing information?

  • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    The main instance I found to replace lemm.ee was lemmy.zip. They seem to be well-regarded, well-admined, and appear to have a similar (de)federation philosophy as lemm.ee. In other words, they are widely federated in both directions, which is an increasing rarity on the “threadiverse” (Lemmy and other similar federated discussion software). One interesting thing they do is that in place of completely defederating some of the more controversial instances like hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, they pre-emptively block those instances for new users instead. I feel that this is absolutely the correct middle-ground approach as it leaves the choice with the user (edit: while still hiding the controversial instances from new users).

    Edit: I have learned that reddthat.com only defederates from threads.net, and it seems that lemmy.ml is not defederated from any major instances as far as I can tell, so I’ve removed it from the list below.

    The other instances that still federate widely including those two controversial instances have some other issues:

    • lemmy.today is apparently new and I read yesterday that they’ve been having a bit of an issue with spam
    • lemmy.sdf.org, where I started with my first lemmy account, doesn’t defederate from anyone and seems to not be very actively maintained with lemmy upgrades, etc.
    • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 days ago

      I’m on today and I can recommend it. The whole point of it is not to have its own communities but just to be a neutral place to have an account. That was very appealing me as someone who really doesn’t care about the “pick a community” part of Lemmy.

    • scytale@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 days ago

      I chose .zip as well. Other pluses aside from similar federation principles:

      • Isn’t involved with the big instance infighting
      • Uses the latest version of lemmy
      • Defederated from Threads
      • The admin is transparent with the instance maintenance

      Did you notice how .ee was noticeably faster? Really shows the exceptional job the .ee admins did.

      • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 days ago

        All good points.

        Faster than .zip? Perhaps. But when I moved from lemmy.sdf.org to lemm.ee I went back to using SDF several times because .ee would have major slowdowns. Which is weird because of how hands off the SDF admins seem to be. Perhaps the performance has more to do with network location and resources allocated to the server?

        • scytale@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          3 days ago

          Probably yeah. To be fair, I came from .world when I moved to .ee 2 years ago because of the almost daily downtime, so it’s a pretty low bar. I feel .ee has been performing exceptionally well since then though, and I immediately felt the difference when I moved to .zip. Not a knock on .zip though, I do like it here.

          • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            3 days ago

            Ah, yes, I can understand that. I remember reading about all the issues that .world was having in the early days. Good to hear you like .zip though.