None, it’s all 1 big network. Each instance is a different flavor of the same thing.
Tangent: I don’t understand why existing in an instance somehow makes a user any different than anyone else. Yet, I hear people saying things like “typical lemm.ml user” or crap about Hexbear users. It’s like people are taking the ideologies of the instance owners and labeling anyone in it to have the same ideologies. Where did this come from?
There’s a little insight into human psychology provided by this whole decentralisation thing. People tend to get pretty tribal about which instance they’re on pretty quickly. It’s obviously pretty silly most of the time, but that’s human nature. In the end I think it counts toward a flaw of decentralisation, though not a fatal one … a lot of people don’t align strongly with any particular instance or their admins and moderation choices and the tribal baggage that comes along with it all, they’re more interested in the whole network … and yet we’re all forced to pick an instance because that’s the architecture.
Instances have specific signup rules, moderation strategies, and accepted speech/posts.
It’s ok to not understand things, but be informed that instances literally materially differentiates users. The impacts are internal and external facing.
None, it’s all 1 big network. Each instance is a different flavor of the same thing.
Tangent: I don’t understand why existing in an instance somehow makes a user any different than anyone else. Yet, I hear people saying things like “typical lemm.ml user” or crap about Hexbear users. It’s like people are taking the ideologies of the instance owners and labeling anyone in it to have the same ideologies. Where did this come from?
There’s a little insight into human psychology provided by this whole decentralisation thing. People tend to get pretty tribal about which instance they’re on pretty quickly. It’s obviously pretty silly most of the time, but that’s human nature. In the end I think it counts toward a flaw of decentralisation, though not a fatal one … a lot of people don’t align strongly with any particular instance or their admins and moderation choices and the tribal baggage that comes along with it all, they’re more interested in the whole network … and yet we’re all forced to pick an instance because that’s the architecture.
Instances have specific signup rules, moderation strategies, and accepted speech/posts.
It’s ok to not understand things, but be informed that instances literally materially differentiates users. The impacts are internal and external facing.
I signed up to lemmy.ml because it was the “main” one. It had more content than any other instances, and it was the first result on Google search
Ok