There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.

Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.

Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.

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[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.

Any examples for that? Latency causing instances not being able to keep up with federation is new to me.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thanks! Didn't know Lemmy doesn't have something like an ingress queue

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That issue being two years, I'm not sure what the current state of things is.

But servers did move towards EU to combat the problem, and haven't moved back for what I know.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago

Issue was fixed several months ago, but yeah it was a problem for quite a while