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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Vlemmy.net as it currently hasn’t defederated from anyone or been defederated.