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.
It’s frustrating to see the largest instance recommended all the time since it’s rather heavy on censorship
To counter my own argument, that’s partly because that instance is less likely to go away or suffer downtime than one run by a single person and with 10 active users. It’s partly why I signed up to it (also because nobody was telling me to do otherwise).