I’m new to Lemmy. I came across join-lemmy.org and browsed the servers by “most active.” Blåhaj stood out to me because of its cute logo. I’m a straight cis girl, but I love the LGBT community, and being an escort I’ve met many trans girls (and some gay guys) through my work, so I’ll always stand in full solidarity with them. I also noticed that the instance has downvotes disabled, which made it feel like the right place for me, lol. Curious how it went for you all.
It’s Francophone, hosted in France, and by people I know and trust, so the choice was easy!
I chose the biggest one because I thought it meant more stuff to look at
Easiest. From what I recall, most of the main instances had weird days-long “waiting lists”.
I’m trying to post memes, not register for a therapist on the NHS lol
Also has a nice aesthetic 🌆
Piefed.zip, because Piefed gets much more feature than Lemmy, and I already liked lemmy.zip updates on [email protected] like this one: https://piefed.zip/c/home/p/655491/lemmy-zip-piefed-zip-server-update-november-2025#post_replies
It was defederated from exploding heads at the time unlike most other instances
.world was the first one I had heard of back when many people were moving over to Lemmy a few years back. Haven’t changed since. If world goes down, I’ll probably switch.
I started on kbin.social because at the time, Kbin’s feature set and rapid development pace sounded a lot more promising than Lemmy. Not to mention the controversies around Lemmy’s core developers.
Once kbin.social died, I jumped to fedia.io with the other refugees.
I wanted to move my /r/piracy subreddit to lemmy and I wanted to ensure a pirate & anarchist friendly instance. So I made my own.
Legend
Went with .world, due to the growing userbase at the time, I had a feeling it would be around to stay. We can worry about avoiding slight centralisation once we have a somewhat significant number of lemmy users.
I wouldn’t consider LW “slight centralisation”.
I’m in the nsfw instance for the articles.
I knew the admin from Reddit. He’s done a decent job.
Because the mods actually stick to some kind of static ruleset.
Mods of all non .world instances seem to be abusive and incapable of just moderating objectively. They will instead do the same shit reddit mods did where if they don’t like anything about you then you will be banned under an umbrella rule with no appeal.
Had an account on .world, but that instance has non stop tech issues. Db0 seemed nice enough, and anarchists are decent company.
I started on .ee since they felt like the most open and least restrictive, leaving me to chose what instances and people I wanted to block. Then when they closed down I moved to .zip for the same reason.
I wanted an instance that would help police things like spam and bots without getting into their own personal political ideologies.
Very similar to you except I started out on the Lemmy app and Lemmy.ml before finding blahaj :)
