I have no horse in this fight (I’m from fedia.io which runs on Mbin, a different platform entirely to Lemmy), but lemm.ee seems like a pretty good general-purpose instance to me. Although, switching to that is not really the most useful way to increase decentralization, as they’re currently the #2 Lemmy instance by active users. But every little bit helps.
I think the most important thing to understand about lemm.ee is their policy on defederation. Broadly, they try to avoid using defederation whenever possible, preferring to handle moderation with finer-precision tools. In theory, this might lead to you seeing more things you don’t like, because they don’t defederate some instances which others do, but it also means you interact with a greater number/variety of people.
If your goal is just to “see all of Lemmy”, lemm.ee seems like a pretty good starting place. Of course, you might have more specific desires or needs and prefer to join an instance that is more heavily defederated from instances with content you might object to, etc.
In terms of the Lemmy software staying up to date, you might want to check out FediDB. It can’t really tell you how quick after an update the various instances upgrade their server software, but you can see that a lot of instances haven’t upgraded to the current version yet. The stable right now is 0.19.10, released 3 weeks ago, so anybody who hasn’t updated yet you can probably assume takes … more than three weeks to update.
As far as federation speed, literally anything else is fine. LW currently takes about 5 days to federate to aussie.zone, because it hasn’t turned on multi-threading despite the feature having been available for months now, and without it, Lemmy has to send each post, comment, or upvote one at a time. So, the large geographical distance between Europe and Australia, combined with the large amount of content LW produces, means it literally cannot federate properly. Everyone else is smaller which means it’s a complete non-issue, and most others have admins who don’t wait many months before upgrading to address problems, so even if they did grow, they’d be able to address the issue.
What’s an alternative that strikes a good balance between userbase, performance, federation speed, etc.?
My LW experience has been mostly fantastic.
I have no horse in this fight (I’m from fedia.io which runs on Mbin, a different platform entirely to Lemmy), but lemm.ee seems like a pretty good general-purpose instance to me. Although, switching to that is not really the most useful way to increase decentralization, as they’re currently the #2 Lemmy instance by active users. But every little bit helps.
I think the most important thing to understand about lemm.ee is their policy on defederation. Broadly, they try to avoid using defederation whenever possible, preferring to handle moderation with finer-precision tools. In theory, this might lead to you seeing more things you don’t like, because they don’t defederate some instances which others do, but it also means you interact with a greater number/variety of people.
If your goal is just to “see all of Lemmy”, lemm.ee seems like a pretty good starting place. Of course, you might have more specific desires or needs and prefer to join an instance that is more heavily defederated from instances with content you might object to, etc.
In terms of the Lemmy software staying up to date, you might want to check out FediDB. It can’t really tell you how quick after an update the various instances upgrade their server software, but you can see that a lot of instances haven’t upgraded to the current version yet. The stable right now is 0.19.10, released 3 weeks ago, so anybody who hasn’t updated yet you can probably assume takes … more than three weeks to update.
You could try out Sopuli.xyz! They tend to stay on top of updates.
As far as federation speed, literally anything else is fine. LW currently takes about 5 days to federate to aussie.zone, because it hasn’t turned on multi-threading despite the feature having been available for months now, and without it, Lemmy has to send each post, comment, or upvote one at a time. So, the large geographical distance between Europe and Australia, combined with the large amount of content LW produces, means it literally cannot federate properly. Everyone else is smaller which means it’s a complete non-issue, and most others have admins who don’t wait many months before upgrading to address problems, so even if they did grow, they’d be able to address the issue.