more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D
Foni@piefed.zip 8 hours ago
I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.
On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
It’s a bit of a faff to export and import your followed community list
Foni@piefed.zip 3 hours ago
I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.
Vittelius@feddit.org 4 hours ago
For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.
The paradox situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.