Not a dumb question.. but some other things to consider:
- moderation/rules
- political leaning/community feel
- geographic location... less important but can influence user experience
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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I was unable to determine any of these before I joined. It certainly isn't easy. Is there a simple way to learn about these qualities of instances?
Front page side bar usually shows rules. The others there is no simple way to find out in advance.
My point was that it DOES matter where you create your account, beyond just getting a name you like. So I expect many people will hop around from instance to instance until they find "home".
That's fair. I do think bouncing around right now isn't too bad. Sign up is simple and names are available. It could be harder later when name choices are slim or sign ups require more effort.
Whilst it's all part of the fediverse experience, I think there needs to be a much lower friction workflow to migrate users, even if banned, to reduce the cost to a user of disagreements with mods that can't be resolved harmoniously on an instance.
The problem is that these aren't always trivial pieces of info to figure out
Pretty much! There isn't currently a way to migrate accounts though, so keep that in mind.
Might not be a feature you need now, but it is a nice-to-have from Mastodon that I'd like to see available everywhere.
My fear is that an instance I join could fold and lose my history and name. I believe we'll probably see a feature that allows migration in the future, but it seems the best solution now is to roll your own.
Same. I think this might also be one of the reasons people join larger instances (besides not knowing where to go). At least it was like that for me. I really hope we see that feature sooner than later. Maybe I'll try setting up my own instance when I have enough time to figure out how that works.
If you can, I'd go with having your own instance at your own domain.
Yes. But think of it as an email. @[email protected] and @[email protected] is the same as @[email protected] and @[email protected].
I have @[email protected] heh
Yep. Find any instance/server you can join. Then search for communities to subscribe to, from any other instances.
I'm all of 2 days old!