How do you choose an instance and does that have a significant effect on your Lemmy experience?
I originally chose to make my account on lemmy.world since all the content seemed to come from there. But I've since learned that I can fill my feed with stuff from any instance so it feels like it doesn't actually matter if I'm on lemmy.world or not. At the same time, Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack so I'm wondering if I should change instance but have no idea what I should even be looking for when choosing.
With current synchronisation problem between instances, choosing a big instance is a no brainer. I don't want to use small instance and got 404 when searching community on other instance or when not all comments from other instances showed up.
there arn't any sync problems currently. You're posting just fine from kbin.social onto lemmy.world and it federated just fine onto my own tiny instance and so many others.
itl only search within communities at least one person on your instance is subbed to yes. and subbing doesn't pull in hardly any previous posts, mostly just new ones from that point on
use something like this to help find communities, and perhaps retry searching on the home instance of a relevant community to search its entire history
When you go into the community search on your instance, make sure you select All instead of Local. You'll get results from all of the instances yours is federated with then.
The community catalogs people post will often take you straight to a different instance—which is different from the one you made your account on and logged into—which is why you see a login prompt.
Searching from your instance with All selected will let you visit communities from any instances yours is connected with while you stay logged in on your home instance. Hope that helps, I tried to simply but it's late and I'm tired.
I think I know what the issue is. I’m using wefwef/voyager. I think the search there is making it hard for me to find things. I’ll try on the computer. Thank you
if you do find something you want to do more than simply view, copy the post or comment url, and then search for it on your home instance for it to be pulled over so you can properly interact with it
This is a good point for not choosing too small. I've made a couple of accounts, and it looks like when a servers crosses that 1,000 or 2,000 user mark you start getting much better consistency than the micro instances with only a few hundred users.
I usually find that I have to reload a few times if I'm the first person to try to subscribe to a community. That happens uncomfortably too often if the instance is small. Even then, it can take a days or possibly never to properly federate.
I'm sure these issues will be fixed, but for now, I'd like myself a small instance but not too small so as to avoid issues with consistency.