I just picked lemmy.one mostly at random, but also in part because it advertised itself as well regulated but also not heavily populated and thus prone to crashing with the recent influx of reddfugees.

Seems to work okay, but I can’t create a community without admin approval and the instance also disallows downvoting, and I’m not a big fan of that at all, but I’ll give it a while longer and see.

I’m still finding it a challenge to find the balance of communities that interest me I used to have. There’s an awful lot of meta chatter about the site itself from new users that, while I understand, gets rather annoying when it takes up the whole feed. So it’s definitely an adjustment, resulting in me using it less than I did my old haunts, but in the meantime I’ve gotten a lot more reading done than I used to, so I’ve got that going for me.

I chose beehaw. I chose wrong. So now I’m on lemmy.world and nothing was lost 😎

lemmy.world seemed reputable with a straightforward domain name, and no out-of-the-ordinary policies.

I actually made my home in the one hosting a previous reddit community I was fond of, just choose one u like.

Joined sh.itjust.works since it’s located in North America, has open registration, and the admin sounds like he knows what he’s doing running a server. I’ve stayed 'cause it’s been stable and I like the admin’s vibe. It and lemmy.world seem to have become the main large “general purpose” instances since they both have open registration.

I also have an account on kbin that I’m not using much at the moment. I think that site has lots of future potential, though.

I was told it was better for load balancing if we didn’t all use the same one. So I just looked for one that had easy signups and didn’t seem overeager to block stuff. Apparently, some from this instance come form /r/china. I’m not, but I do drink coffee. Anyway, I think it’s working out so far; better than reddit anyway.

I joined mander.xyz because it has a central theme around the natural sciences. It could possibly include STEM content as well; there is an ongoing discussion about it. The admin(s) are present and very responsive.

For anyone with a love of science and/or nature I recommend it highly as a home instance of Lemmy.

I chose programming.dev because i am a programmer and developer.

I tend to hang in indie game development subreddits and didn’t want to have to deal with confrontational trolls on a regular basis, so programming.dev felt like a relatively safe choice since it’s neither a super large server or a general-purpose one. I just wanna make lil’ games and have little patience for those lacking in empathy and maturity.

Was looking for a furry one, and pawb.social seemed to be well-run (since it was related to a couple of decently-sized Mastodon servers) and was generic enough (and not NSFW focused). There also seemed to be a decent number of technical people there as well (in fact, one of the Mastodon instances is furry.engineer), so it matched up with my other interests as well. I considered lemmyrs.org, but ended up not choosing it.

lemmy.world is more open and performant than lemmy.ml and Beehaw.

Randomly came across mine. Was gunna join a larger instance just for testing, but it was right as the big Reddit rush was happening and my signups kept failing.

So I went with this one.

Kbin because it was the first one that actually let me register and didn’t freeze