Was looking for a furry one, and pawb.social seemed to be well-run (since it was related to a couple of decently-sized Mastodon servers) and was generic enough (and not NSFW focused).
There also seemed to be a decent number of technical people there as well (in fact, one of the Mastodon instances is furry.engineer), so it matched up with my other interests as well. I considered lemmyrs.org, but ended up not choosing it.
i moved over to lemmy.world after i heard somewhere that lemmy.ml was run by a tankie and had been censoring proof of the tiananmen square massacre. idk if it's true or not, but I didn't wanna take any chances.
I landed at vlemmy.net. I tried to register at a few bigger ones that gave infinite circles. By the time I got to vlemmy I wasn't really being too picky anymore, I was just trying to figure out if the problem was me or overloading.
A nice side effect of landing there is that some of my very few subscriptions are on beehaw, and we haven't been defederated.
I chose lemmy.world solely on the fact it had a lot of members. Lemmy.ml was a contender too. I just wanted to jump in and check things out. Knowing (slightly)more now, I don't think it was a bad choice.
feddit.dk. I wanted a regional instance as my home instance, because they tend to be chill with controlled growth, while also having native language discussions. My country didn't have a Lemmy instance at the time, so I picked the closest option. I love Denmark and they don't seem too annoyed by my presence (yet). Thanks for having me 🫶🏻 🇩🇰
Seriously, this. I tried for days to register on Lemmy. One day I was mid-registration and the button was just spinning, doing nothing, so I came over to kbin, registered and started using the site. Lemmy never stopped spinning. No thanks.
I initially used reddthat.com because I've already tried 5 different instances and the sign up doesnt work. Then I remembered about the piracy community, so i switched over to lemmy.dbzer0.com, a pirate heaven. Feels like home. 😎🏴☠️
This was linked on some post about alternatives to that other site I want to stop using. And honestly I'm quite confused on the "it doesn't matter/it does matter" so I'm just rolling with it and not trying to worry about it.
I'm still getting used to the concept of federation so... I created my initial account on beehaw because I liked it's ethos about being a safe and welcoming space. Then they defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, which produced a lot of content i was going to be missing out on, so i created an alt on lemmy.world. I then realized this meant I'd have to swap back and forth between accounts to see both instances activity, so i moved to reddthat which is a nice little australian community, and this allows me to participate in beehaw posts, as well as lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works without switching accounts
I joined mander.xyz because it has a central theme around the natural sciences. It could possibly include STEM content as well; there is an ongoing discussion about it. The admin(s) are present and very responsive.
For anyone with a love of science and/or nature I recommend it highly as a home instance of Lemmy.
Joined sh.itjust.works since it's located in North America, has open registration, and the admin sounds like he knows what he's doing running a server. I've stayed 'cause it's been stable and I like the admin's vibe. It and lemmy.world seem to have become the main large "general purpose" instances since they both have open registration.
I also have an account on kbin that I'm not using much at the moment. I think that site has lots of future potential, though.
Randomly came across mine. Was gunna join a larger instance just for testing, but it was right as the big Reddit rush was happening and my signups kept failing.
I just picked lemmy.one mostly at random, but also in part because it advertised itself as well regulated but also not heavily populated and thus prone to crashing with the recent influx of reddfugees.
Seems to work okay, but I can't create a community without admin approval and the instance also disallows downvoting, and I'm not a big fan of that at all, but I'll give it a while longer and see.
I'm still finding it a challenge to find the balance of communities that interest me I used to have. There's an awful lot of meta chatter about the site itself from new users that, while I understand, gets rather annoying when it takes up the whole feed. So it's definitely an adjustment, resulting in me using it less than I did my old haunts, but in the meantime I've gotten a lot more reading done than I used to, so I've got that going for me.
Me, I'm waiting for things to settle a bit and see what recommendations float to the surface for me. Not being able to downvote might turn out to actually be good for my own mental health. We'll see.
I chose kbin.social because of the alleged tankie issues at Lemmy. I didn't know enough about the fediverse to realise though that only a handful of Lemmy instances were included in the "warning" I'd heard about, so I looked to kbin instead.
Based on what I've seen from the admin here, though, I'm confident I'm in the right instance. He seems like an honest, stand-up dude who genuinely believes in all the best things the fediverse seems to be capable of
I kind of wish they chose "fedd.itjust.works" which was the other suggestion in that thread. "sh.itjust.works" is funny but looks like it's a shitposting instance.
I used Lemmy for a while but now I am planning to exclusively use kbin. It appears to be a way more mature project and is infinitely better UI/UX wise than Lemmy. Moreover it's a project maintained by a fellow Polander and not a bunch of tankies.
As it's open source I wouldn't look down on people using Lemmy, but if you are going to use it I'd recommend staying away from the main server/lemmy.ml.
I chose Kbin myself because it's way more like old reddit and I wasn't jazzed with the devs of Lemmy.
I joined Beehaw early on when things where a lot quieter because I liked what they were trying to do (and back then there were only like two instances, and I didn't want to put more load on lemmy.ml).
Joined sh.itjust.works to make a community after the sysadmin just casually walked up with a huge server, which is a level of swagger I can get behind. I've since moved to this as my "main" account since Beehaw defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works (which sucks, but is understandable).
May move again to pawb.social at some point, although that means people will know something about me. :P
Edit: And now pawb.social has defederated with sh.itjust.works... I'm getting more and more tempted to just roll my own personal instance just for me...
Yeah, I was a bit confused at the start and in my haste created a few different accounts across kbin, lemmy.world, and Mastodon. Worst case scenario I have backups and I'll just end up using the instance I prefer the most, the most.
I joined @lemmy.world because the admin @ruud@lemmy.world had a lot of experience running a large Mastodon instance, and @lemmy.ml was asking folks to go elsewhere.
Same. Finding an instance with the best community or matching interests felt silly when everything is changing quickly and discovery is still underbaked. I went with Lemmy.world because they seemed like the most capable admins.