I haven’t checked Lemmy for a long time but I wanna get off Reddit again, yet I still need to know how many users are on here. Which lemmy instances are suitable to me, the most popular, and which ones to avoid? For context, im queer, anarchist with DemSoc leaning, and environmentalist. Is there a comprehensive list of all the instances and their main functions? Is the instance I’m on still workable? Any feedback would help, thx. <3
Lots of rude and hateful comments over here generating a ton of reports. Next time I’m issuing perma-bans for this kind of nonsense. Be respectful.
I joined Lemmy.today to see all the instances, they don’t block anyone. I expected chaos, but it’s richer. To be fair, I rarely browse ‘All,’ instead sticking to subscribed coms where the backwards-speaking wanderers from hexbear are more of a feature than a bug.
Now it’s my main account.
PR Edit: I meant no offense to the good people of hexbear, I’m just confused by your ways.
Browsing /subscribed only is definitely the way.
IIRC a few instances are de-federated from .today due to how rightwing/conservative it is. So it’s a bit like shadowbanning yourself.
Edit: Just checked, Lemmy.Today isn’t blocked by any instances.
Last I checked .today was defederated by one instance, don’t know why.I’m open to more info.The description and the rules are boilerplate, no bigotry or transphobia kind of thing. The admins have been helpful and responsive. I can see why conservatives would join an instance like this, but there’s nothing inherently conservative about it.
When I joined the most-visited local community was conservative, but they’re pretty tame by right wing standards. A couple of the mods posted left-leaning articles to my community, too.
I don’t pay attention to a lot of Lemmy drama unless it crosses my feed, so I could be wrong.
The rules on Lemmy.ml are innocuous too, fwiw.
As are the rules of most instances.
so using the rules as a metric is like the points on who’s line
Let’s examine that.
The points on Who’s Line don’t matter, as a rule - but they do matter because they give the rankings at the end of the show. If the points really didn’t matter, we wouldn’t know about them. “Points” wouldn’t be a subject on the show, and yet they come up at the end of every skit. One person even tallied them up. The points mattered to them, a lot.
Anyway, do you have information or were you just itching to make that quip?
beep boop
I’m honestly embarrassed by the comments on this post. Is this really the best advice we can offer a newcomer to Lemmy? This internecene warfare between instances is not doing us any favours.
Nearly all of that is just a few people flaming out when suspected communists comment in “their” internet spaces, even when those comments weren’t particularly about communism.

Yeah. Yikes.
The advice is decent actually. It’s the non-advice comments that should just be deleted. Even the advice from that .ml guy is careful. Wouldn’t have caused any issue if someone didn’t pick the fight while fully aware that there will not be a resolution.
probably lemmy.ml
Lol no
We’re not all bad here!
That’s the 3rd worst?
This thread is wild. I am good on Lemmy. I like sopuli.xyz
blahaj isn’t particularly hostile toward anarchism or democratic socialism, I don’t think, but it’s largely a liberal instance. It’s defederated from hexbear & lemmygrad, so a lot of socialist content is blocked.
dbzer0 is explicitly anarchist. It blocks lemmygrad but not hexbear.
slrpnk is anarchist-friendly and environmentalist. It blocks both hexbear & lemmygrad.
lemmy.ml is predominantly socialist. It’s federated with everyone except for porn and fascist instances[1]. The only instances that block it that I can only think of are infosec.pub, lemmy.cafe, and programming.dev.
Quite a few instances are defederated from lemmygrad and/or hexbear. Hexbear is basically only blocks lemmy.world, and lemmygrad only blocks porn and fascist instances.
For instance, hilariouschaos, the successor to explodingheads. ↩︎
blahaj is very welcome toward anarchism and democratic socialism, it’s hostile towards authoritarian regimes
Wait, why does lemmy.ml block infosec.pub, lemmy.cafe and programming.dev? All these seem innocuous?
It doesn’t block them; they block it.
lemmy.ml is predominantly socialist.
Saying ML is socialist (which it’s not, it’s a tankie instance) is de facto discrediting socialism.
It’s like saying that socialists oppose any criticism of russia and china (authoritarian, imperialist, hyper-capitalist oligarchic countries that have nothing to do with socialism) and socialist only read Russia Today.
There are actual socialists here! We just aren’t as loud as the tankies.
Then why partake in ML?
It’s hard to guess why you’re dissatisfied with blahaj.zone. Far as I know it still has a good reputation.
If blahaj.zone is still great then im proud to be on this instance :3 im just exploring other options in case
If you like Blahaj then there is also a Piefed Blahaj instance now! I like Piefed over lemmy, I don’t know if they’ve added it to lemmy since I left but I really like being able to mute replies. It has other features lemmy lacks too, like being able to block an entire instance or make feeds (multireddit like function).
ooh is there a list of piefed instances from most popular to most endorsements? And specifically ones that tailor to solarpunk/anarchism/lgbtq+? i wonder why everyone shifted to piefed? is it because one of the lemmy devs had a controversial past?
If you go here you can sort by size, uptime, etc, I’m not sure if anyone has made a curated list anywhere. There’s only a few instances with 100+ users, but since you’re seeing all the same fediverse content anyway it doesn’t matter much. My policy was to just pick an instance I trusted (already trusted Blahaj, so that was easy).
I would say it’s probably a good idea to pick an instance with at least 30-40 people, because the more people who have subscribed to remote communities, the more content will automatically federate to the instance (therefor making it easier for you to find new content).
People just like it better. You’re probably overthinking these things. The point of federation is so that these decisions don’t matter as much. (Almost) all the instances are connected and sharing the same community and content. There is no magic “best” place to be, and if there is, it won’t be because it’s “popular” it will be because it’s “the right one for you”.
Some instances have rules and some instances have toxic developers like the ones at .ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad. I dont wanna be near them
I have an alt on https://quokk.au/, there’s also https://anarchist.nexus/.
Worst part is they are all on cloudflare. I only found 2 that are not. they are feddit.fr and peifed.hlahaz
iirc Lemmy.dbzer0.com isn’t either.
Our dear wrench monkey , tenchiken, is working on moving anarchist.nexus off cloudflare too, nice
Well for anarchist/queer/pro-environment, Lemmy.dbzer0.com slrpnk.net and (kinda) Lemmy.blahaj.zone, not officially but tons of anarchists there.
Another important thing to consider is federation policy (if you’re looking to make accounts there and not just browse comms from your current acc:)). For example Dbzer0 is the most lax and blahaj is the most moderated, not necessarily good or bad it just depends on what you personally want.
Edit: also welcome back to lemmy !
Is there an overview of the rules for all three instances? And which one is the most popular?
Just check each one’s sidebar and see what you like best :).
Iirc there is a website for this yes, but i can’t get it right now, sorry. But off the top of my head, top to bottom: dbzer0,blahaj, solarpunk
To be honest since you can design everything by joining communities you like. I feel like it doesn’t matter
I would like to know which ones are tailored to my interests, so i dont wanna join something like .ml. I remember there used to be a sheet somewhere with endorsements but i cant find it anymore
Endorsements? https://gui.fediseer.com/ maybe?
Interesting tool.
How is that ML only has two censures:
https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml
ML is a tankie instance.
Also fascinating to see DB0 giving an endorsement to ML. Not surprising though.
Censuring completely defederates an instance (at least with threativore) and most instances aren’t defederated with ml anyway, so this makes sense:)
It has recieved two hesitations tho, which are like censures but without defederation
Ah I see. I didn’t realize a censure had a technical component. That being said, by this point not much would be lost with a defederation from ML.
Still a mere two hesitations and tons of endorsements (including DB0).
ML are basically on par with Nazis; full endorsement of extermination of national identity/language/culture of “bad” ethnicities, support for russian Lebensraum, support for mass internment camps for “bad” ethnicities.
Sure, they deny this, but from memory all of the Nazis at Nuremberg pleaded not guilty.
.ml isn’t significantly worse than hexbear, beehaw, or blahaj.
All of them love censorship to support their narrative.
I’m in a similar boat, though I’ve been present for some time.
Dbzer0 seems like the best “fit” for me, but practically I just want the instance that’s not defederated/blocking other instances.
…Not sure which that is. But I’d look at Piefed before Lemmy, since they work together, but Piefed seems more desirable feature-wise.
Lemmy.sdf.org and lemmy.zip have very lax defederation policies, those might interest you
Do other instances defederate with them, though?
AFAIK no. Lemmy.zip is not problematic and SDF largely stays in the background.
I tried to verify this but the only tool for this stuff, defed.xyz, seems to have shut down 4 months ago, shame.
lemmy.today is federated both ways with pretty much all of Lemmy, from .world to tankie triad to beehaw
You know what’s nice? That we have this option at all. I’m partial to sdf, piefed, and world myself.
It says there are 200 comments but I can see 2. So my 2 cents, jump onto the easiest instance you can. For me, that was .world. Get on the boat, then reassess when you have more time.
The first jump, reddit to Lemmy, is the hardest. The second is super easy in comparison.
That was my first instance before i decided to change. Ngl i prob shoulda stuck with world coz i do be a general purpose fam. Thats why i started piefed with the main instance
It says there are 200 comments but I can see 2
This happens if other users have blocked you or your instance.
Sh.itjust.works is fine if you want to join a mid-sized instance.
I personally find DB0 to be a bit suspect (they tolerate and sometimes enable tankies).
Sh.itjust.works has been rumoured to have fascist views…
This comment means they’re facist to you? 😂
No, I just read that and assumed it to be true. I’ll believe it to be false if you can offer a convincing replace statement
I don’t think there can be that high a density of fascists. sh.itjust.works just voted overwhelmingly to defederate some kind of MAGA nonsense instance. Mostly it seems like nice folks overhere who know fascists are bad news.
It might be full of individualists with no grounding in Marxist theory, of the type that much annoyed Vladimir Lennin. I couldn’t tell you because of my poor grounding Marxist theory, and I don’t see that as a problem because of my individualism.
I think you should educate yourself a bit more on the subject
Please indulge me, my well educated friend.
Join multiple for when you get banned in some sub.















