Buried underneath “LPT: Being nice to others is free.”

Both of those games were so fucking good.

“Orgies.”

This was one of the top instances recommended on join-lemmy, and it couldn’t find top communities from lemmyverse. Out of curiosity, I poked my head back to the instance a second ago, and I see users asking the server owner about it.

Maybe my experience is rare, but if the instance you choose is going to have a material effect on what instances and communities you can interact with, that’s essential info to choosing a home.

Admins / instance owners can control what other instances and communities the local users have access to. And entire instances can be dropped automatically because of long response times.

1. Low user numbers
2. High uptime percentage
3. Little to no blocked servers and communities
4. Allows user created communities

Beyond that, I personally don’t care.

Searching for specific communities and they aren’t present on the server.

Which is a problem. The onboarding for the fediverse - especially choosing a lemmy instance if that is the direction you want - is way too obtuse right now. Instances are definitely not all equal, and the icon and description are the least useful data points to rely upon.

Unless I’m overlooking it, join-lemmy provides no essential info to choosing an instance. It doesn’t display uptime, location, number of users, age, or number of connected instances.

I used It and ended up on an instance that seemed to be missing many male** communities and was on the other side of the planet from me (though fortunately did not have too many other users). Then I followed a different instance browser and found a much better one for me.

EDIT: ** was supposed to say major communities, not male communities. But I’m leaving it because

Yeah I’m not sure what the algorithm is taking into account in deciding “hot.” Seems it is “recent views but only because the formula fed this old stuff to the last few rounds, too.”