I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.
All fine and dandy, but don’t just pick a random one close to you. Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don’t even require an email address to sign up.
Like if you are ginger or not
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn’t say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
My main concern would be instance longevity.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)
A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you’re behind CG-NAT you don’t get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don’t think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.
My main concern would be instance longevity
This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don’t mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.
Close to you helps in general, it’s not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.
Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community
How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?
Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.
Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least
Won’t you see limited posts?
Not if they’re federated to the larger instances, which they are by default. I think maybe you need to search an instance to start if no one from your instance has searched for the other instance yet, but idk, don’t quote me on that
I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.
You’ll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I’ll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)
