I think lemmy.world is in a great position because the admin has experience hosting decentralized platforms and already has a good pipeline to cover server costs because of that.

lemmy.ml is also the first instance that I joined. I don’t think lemmy.ml should drop off. Since it’s run by the lemmy devs I think they have their hands more than full at the moment, but I’m hopeful that things will stabilize eventually and they will get more financial support with the new users.

I think it’s important to have at least a few big populated instances that are “main” instances. I like what I see with lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, and beehaw.org. Personally I think it’s bad if we are too centralized on one instance or too spread out on a bunch of others. It seems like it’s going fairly well so far though, and I hope that when other big instances keep growing (and like I said get some more financial support from the community) they can improve their hardware too.

There's already enough controversy with that instance.

I joined about 10 minutes ago, it was a tough decision. Do I go with a small server as an experiment? Do I go with a large one? What about self-hosting? I settled on this one after reading the post from the admin about upgrading hardware. My hope is that it will stick around, but that's the beauty of the Fediverse. You can always join another instance if the community doesn't work out for you.

speaking of "good specs" any docs beyond the ansible docs considered a good guide?