After spending a few days learning about lemmy and other fediverse websites, I was curious about people's processes for picking a server that is right for them. I've seen most posts say to pick one that is not too big or small and that has similar interests as yourself. But if we are all mostly federated, doesn't it make the most sense to join the biggest or likeliest server to stay around and federated with the most other servers? Then you can just travel to the instances you share interests in. I chose this instance because you could just sign up and be in it, and that was all I needed to check things out. And although I found many communities in other instances, even if let's say all of my subscribed communities are on other instances, doesn't it make sense to just stay here so long as they are federated with sh.itjust.works? It may be too early to know for sure, but it seems like this instance is going to stick around for the foreseeable future, why risk joining the smaller instances that might not be here for long. Also, if you have subscribed communities in several instances, I assume you have to follow all the different server's rules. I'd be curious to hear other people's thoughts in regards to picking a home instance.
Edit: Are there any restrictions to interacting with communities on other instances?
I hadn't considered making my own instance for private use. Not sure if that was what you meant or not. But it may be the safest way of ensuring your data doesn't get lost. My worry with small servers is that who ever is running them might lose interest and shut down permanently. But if a server is too big, there may be disagreements that lead to de-federating. Thanks for the tips.
Yep. That’s exactly what I did. So I can control my backups etc. their Ansible docs are solid and work fine. I would imagine the docker are as well since the Ansible docs just initiate a remote docker install.
I’ve done some setup and have been chewing on opening it up come July if there’s a huge flood.
But it’s gonna be a user only instance in that case. I have no time or desire to moderate people’s nonsense in communities. Heck even the prospect of moderating reports of their nonsense in other communities isn’t really appealing.
So the concern on smaller ones petering out, may not be too far off. Mine will likely be up for at least a year. And I will let folks know before I shut it down, if it’s opened up.