The Fediverse is huge and overwhelming to a newcomer, with many different types and each with servers to pick from. Which ones would you suggest checking out or avoiding?
Just FYI everyone, this spike is sort of a glitch and its quite obvious just from looking at how steep the curve is. It all comes from nodebb which is a forum software and i guess they switched on federation on 11.01.2026 which gave us this magical bump.
They are real users probably, but what i mean is that this wasnt a rush of new users, but just old (mostly inactive) users that were never considered part of the fediverse until now.
On a slightly different note NodeBB is very cool and worth checking out. Did those unaware it’s a Goodreads, Letterboxd, Steam Reviews, etc all rolled into one.
As far as I understand, lemmy instances are sort of a community with communities inside. It seems that each isntance has their own like minded userbase. .world has basich mix of everyone due to popularity, .ml holds strong beliefs politically, blahaj.zone is more progressive in gender identity, piefed.social is more mainstream decentralized instance. And of course there are more I didn’t mention.
I am on dbzer0 because I am into selfhosting and sailing the seas. It fits me well. Tied to one instance doesn’t stop me from engaging on other instances except the ones I blacklisted.
Check the instances and their descriptions and find something that fits you.
db0 and sh. are my viiiibbbbbee
db0 is also pro-GenAI, which seems unfortunate to me.
You can do what I do and just block the genAI art comms.
No harm, no foul, I just am not interested in the content.
While I can’t say for certain, I would strongly suspect that a lot of the people in those comms are self hosting their LLMs/Image generators, if that makes you feel any better.
But uh, there are a variety of nuanced stances on LLMs and such, amongst the other m@teys I’ve talked with.
Its… not like we’re all super duper no holds barred put AI in everything advocates.
A lot of us are… quite a lot closer to ‘Butlerian Jihad NOW’, lol.
At the risk of starting an argument (sorry)… I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people. It’s stealing the results of hard work of people to produce derivative work with the intent of replacing those same people. Thus, while self-hosting does remove some concerns related to big corporations, I think it still empowers them by supporting the tech they deal in.
I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.
And of course an instance isn’t homogenous with regard to its users, and I don’t condemn people for using db0, but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.
I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people.
I mean personally, I do as well.
But… it’s Pandora’s box.
You can’t uninvent it, basically.
We could theoretically limit or heavily regulate its further development, but again realistically, with how much money and power tech corporations have, how much influence they have over lawmakers…
… unless you’re gonna go find an ‘AI’ datacenter and put salt or sulfuric acid or something into the cooling loops, no you probably can’t really do much to effectively impede it.
I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.
I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.
I don’t know that it like, stems or comes from GenAI comms on db0.
but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.
Well I don’t know precisely what db0’s (the admin) exact stance on GenAI is, but I do know that db0 the instance and community has a highly involved and active goverance model for instance rules and associations. There are fairly often major discussions and votes on a good deal of issues… as opposed to many other instances that basically just come down to the whims of the admin + a clique of powermods.
db0 themself has done more than any other instance admin I am aware of to make it so that if the community itself opposes their own personal opinion, they’ll adopt the community’s opinion and simply be an executor/facilitator of it.
I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.
I’m pretty sure some of the most popular communities on db0 use GenAI art for banner and icon - checking now, the banner art for piracy, ADHD memes, anarchism, yepowertrippingbastards appear to be GenAI (admittedly fewer than I expected), and the icon for the instance itself is suspicious.
Unfortunately though, that’s also not a problem exclusive to db0, and with the nature of federation it’s kinda inescapable when most people don’t care, unless I want to lock myself to niche communities.
I will also note, I believe db0 is hosting or participating in some kind of distributed GenAI network called The Horde, so it’s not just individual community members’ opinions, it’s an organizational endorsement of GenAI.
A crowdsourced distributed cluster of image generation workers and text generation workers for generating AI media.
Free & Open Source
Powered by volunteers running open source software on their own hardware. Start generating now!
Community Driven
Join the Haidra community by becoming a worker and share your GPU power.
Distributed Power
Harness the collective GPU power of volunteer workers for your generations.
No Lock-in
Use any compatible client or build your own with our open REST APIs.
Yep, so its a bunch of volunteers, running their own local hardware, but also linking it together, to provide a kind of mutual usage network for generating images.
And yep, db0 themself is pretty involved in this.
EDIT: (As best as I can tell, I’ve not like, talked to them about it myself, or been involved in those comms.)
… but you can’t singly host a distributed network.
You can participate in it, architect it, but… the whole concept is that it is distributed, localized.
You know, like Lemmy, as opposed to Reddit or BlueSky, which are centralized.
So… this is what I met by more nuanced stances on LLMs/Neuralnet image generation.
More or less, this is like the rules that govern something like a private torrent tracker and network, but applied to GenAI.
So its an alternative way of providing distributed GenAI capabilities to those who contribute to other people also being able to have those capabilities.
As opposed to the essentially totally black box governance model of a random person getting an API token for a corporate AI network, that has massive negative externalities in that those are run on giant server farms that do things like massively run up local/regional power and water usage/costs, where you can safely presume the corpo networks are entirely harvesting all the data you send in to them.
You can be I guess 100% against the entire concept of GenAI, but see my previous point of it’s Pandora’s Box, you can’t uninvent it, its not going to go away because you don’t like it and think its bad.
… and to be clear, there are a plethora of valid reasons to be critical of it, legitimate problems.
But, a more practical and effectice way to address those things is to attempt to provide an alternate, more equitable, more transparent paradigm for its use.
But, a more practical and effectice way to address those things is to attempt to provide an alternate, more equitable, more transparent paradigm for its use.
Yeah, the issue is that I simply disagree, and consider the usage of models trained on data obtained without permission to be immoral, and thus unless the model is trained entirely on data supplied with consent (which is supposedly implausible), and thus people facilitating and/or promoting the usage of such to be… ethically unaligned me, and thus I don’t want to associate with them
All that said, I also don’t want to argue or try to convince you here, and want to thank you for being civil in the discussion
In addition to being a themed community of communities, instances also have different federation/defederation policy. dbzer0 is defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, for example, while being federated with Hexbear.net. There’s also the differences on how upvoting and downvoting is treated among instances, with some disabling downvotes and some disabling voting altogether.
!main@sh.itjust.works they are very new-user friendly, diaspora: idfk its dead, mastodon: official instance, peertube: peertube.wtf with official app to do federation stuff
peertube: peertube.wtf with official app to do federation stuff
I assume you can login into it via GrayJay as well
never used grayjay to begin with, used different apps for different fediverse stuff
Second for sh.itjust.works
I picked this server cause the name was funny and it was large enough that I expected not to run into small-server problems.
I stayed because I have not run into any small-server problems and our admin is a very cool guy.
I would recommend use https://join-lemmy.org/ it suggest a generic instance and also lets search specific instances.
Hard to take that list seriously.
World is missing, and ML, Hexbear, and Lemmygrad are the top promoted servers. What a joke.
.world is missing because it’s way too big, and Grad is below other servers like dbzer0, sh.itjust.worlks, Blahaj.zone, Lemmy.ca, programming.dev, etc. Hex and .ml are up high because, like it or not, they are highly active non-.world instances.
What you have wrote is false, and you know it.
I joined this one because the main one was defederating a whole bunch of pirate ones and that makes no goddamn sense. thanks 👍
mods will be like hey let’s make it so our users can’t access stuff. that makes sense. I bet that’s what they want. they want to not have access to things. they think it’s good
smart and federal
.world is squeamish about upsetting corpos because they’re the biggest instance.
Blahaj.zone we’re chill AF here
I don’t like that you can’t downvote, though.
Exactly. I look at downvotes on articles as a kind of fact curator. If an article has 50/50, you know it’s gotta be wrong.
Discussion of an article’s accuracy is what the comments are for; downvotes are a pretty bad indicator of this as they’re largely used to indicate agreement with the post’s title (which may include disagreeing with it’s accuracy, message, vibe, spelling, etc.)
People also just downvote stuff they disagree with. If you use the downvotes on a post or comment as the indicator of whether it’s correct or not you’ll just end up believing only the things the majority of the users believe are true, instead of using evidence or any kind of facts.
9 day old account on ml. Stop trolling
One day this account will be 2 years old and its posts will be recognized for their greatness. But until then, it’ll just be a sockpuppet troll account. Very sad.
I’ve only been outside of Hexbear (where there also are no downvotes) for a week and I hate having downvotes. Instead of people replying to something they disagree with with evidence and counterarguments, people just downvote and move on. They really shouldn’t be used to downvote comments people disagree with (because that just promotes groupthink), ideally they’d just be used to downvote spam and low effort stuff; but moderators can take care of that, so what’s the point?
I prefer that the community have some say in deciding what comments are objectionable rather than relying on mods for every little thing.
If something is objectional you should say something about it, it’s one thing for bots and spam, but if you see someone posting an unforced error, you should tell them they’re wrong
not to invoke leddit, but you should be able to communicate with other human beings
Okay, so the community should be able to reply to the objectionable comments with the reasons why they think they’re objectionable. All downvotes do is let people shut down the conversation without even thinking.
Sometimes comments are poor without being worthy of a conversation about it. The commenter can always ask if they see downvotes and are confused as to why.
In that situation those low value comments that aren’t explicitly rulebreaking just proceed to get no upvotes and are functionally the same as a comment that got downvoted. So there isn’t really any value gained from having downvotes in this scenario, while they provide negative value in other scenarios.
To be clear, one comment having 1-2 upvotes and a reply to it having a dozen or more upvotes gets that across just fine, it just requires the reply in the first place.
Ah, well that would explain why Voyager kept giving errors every time I tried
OHHH THAT’S why Voyager gives me an error.
Sigh, these are the things that might drive people away from Lemmy and Piefed. Lemmy devs are tankies, Piefed devs are weirdly puritanical, and instances won’t tell you they don’t allow downvotes.
I really wish Blahaj was federated with Hexbear :(
Just browse Join-Lemmy and pick an instance that sticks out and you like the vibe of, with good local communities and decent federation. The only one I truly recommend avoiding is Lemmy.world, due to its size and moderation on some larger communities.
+1 for Hexbear, check it out if .world is too liberal for you. This place really feels like reddit, but somehow even more Dem apologist
+1 Hexbear if you like increasingly abstracted inside jokes about owls and beans
beans
Totally organic account right here, definitely not an alt
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You have a🔻in your username. That makes you a “tankie” to a huge portion of the people who hate communists, too. We’re both going to get sent to the same camps.
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Wait, you don’t support Hamas?
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Well yeah it does, you’re on lemmy.world which sometimes has a lot of Zionist apologia. In most online political spaces, the🔻symbol is a reference to videos from Hamas where they would overlay a similar red triangle over an Israeli soldier/tank/military target before it gets hit.
I guess it’s still germane to my point, though. If you do think Hamas is cool because you hate the genocidal regime of Israel, that makes you a “tankie” or at least comparable to one in the eyes of most anticommunists. Functionally, the people who actually will fight “tankies” (as in communists) area also the people who will put you in a camp for being anti-zionist or having other left wing positions.
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Hamas is genocidal
me when I make shit up
Honestly I don’t think this person is saying Hamas is genocidal. I think he’s very confused and is really insistent that tankies love genocide, so he was trying to like, pre-move me. But as far as I can tell the implied genocidal regime he’s opposed to is China, not Hamas. Obviously that opens a whole other can of worms but he won’t reply to my last comment.
Since when was the Palestinian resistance to genocide genocidal themselves? What kind of hasbara is this?
Lol. These are the people calling you tankies
One that is not blocked by a lot of other instances…
Anyone know why the recent spike? That’s not negligible.
https://lemmy.world/post/43035743/22099833 Apparently old forum software was updated to use the federation and all the old users got tallied up and added. Also people flocking from Reddit and X too.
Hexbear, pretty chill community that is overtly pro-LGBTQ and inclusive of all kinds of leftists.
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Rude and uncalled for
If I wanted to argue with tankies I’d just go back to Twitter
Rude
Go for a smaller European one, the one I’m on is in Finland. Me, I like Finland, the fins are sexy. And why only use one instance, you can have a user on several, that way
you can downvote your own posts and discuss with a person that is as intelligent as yourself (mainly because it actually is you!) I mean:you can try out the audience and communities, which are different on all servers.Thanks
Well, it depends on what they want. There are different platforms in the fediverse that work very differently. Mastodon and Lemmy/PieFed can interact with each other, but it’s always painful. For Lemmy/PieFed I’d recommend they look for an instance that has a local feed that fits their interests. Ideally an instance that is federated with most large instances, otherwise it gets a little too boring.
Liked the name.
