It sounds like you might be asking for communities rather than instances.
!historyartifacts@piefed.social
!Art_Alchemist_Guild@lemmy.today
These are some nice ones. Not all are always super active all the time but there's usually some activity. I'll update my list if I can think of more
Oops, I definitely am and did not realize I was using the wrong word :')
My old ass is over here with the anarchists and pirates at lemmy.dbzer0 and we're just a jolly bunch of assholes. 
The entire vibe of lemmy seems to be way jollier from my experience but Im wondering if it just is because I havent come across some kinda dark underbelly yet or if it really is just way more chill here
Of course it looks that way to you, since your instance already defederated from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net and other toxic cesspits - see recent example (Lemmy.World's statement and reasoning for defederation from Lemmy.org). The LW admin team does a lot of work to keep things this chill.:-)
There always seems to be drama between instances.
There absolutely is a darker side to Lemmy, but for the most part, many of those "legacy" instances have already been pruned from the federation that we are in now. (I suspect there are smaller, highly niche, "Lemmy" bubbles that even I wouldn't want to go looking for that have never federated with the larger group. There are also various branches you can explore via instances that keep their doors mostly open.)
On the surface, and depending on what you consider toxic, the misinformation campaigns that are run on Lemmy seem fairly normal, but can get fairly dark if you understand the sources and start to do broader geolocation estimation of some of the participants.
There are still the occasional DDoS's and the occasional CSAM posters, both of those are only a degree or two away from the really nasty shit.
The biggest issue now, and probably will always be, is how easy it is to avoid bans. Some seriously troubled users have generated hundreds of accounts across multiple instances just to troll and appear to generate traffic to specific communities. ("you_emm" being one of the worst, but its posts are fairly easy to sniff out still. It will actively search for untagged mentions as well, hence, my obfuscation.)
But for the most part, the bullshit is easy to filter out. When you stumble across a specific niche, they tend to niche themselves super hard, so beware. All-in-all, Lemmy is chill and fairly quiet which is why I still use it.
It is way more chill. Feels like 2014 Reddit.
I can't remember which instances but there are a few "tankies" that are defederated by a lot of instances.
Yup, the tankie triad: Lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad.ml
The three are pretty widely defederated. As a new user, they actually appear extremely calm and accepting. But it’s because all three are very heavily moderated, so anything outside of their extremely narrow overton window gets quashed very quickly.
Lemmy.ml is still federated by a lot of instances simply because the lead dev for Lemmy exclusively posts on .ml. So if an instance admin wants to stay on top of Lemmy development, they’re required to federate with .ml. But it’s also worth noting that any donations for lemmy’s development also go towards keeping .ml’s lights on. The dev has openly stated that he doesn’t do any kind of accounting to keep the two funding pools separated. So any donations that go towards lemmy’s development will also go towards one of the tankie instances.
They also spend a lot of time moderating and keep asking for money to develop lemmy so they don’t have to work.
Between that and funding .ml is why I switched to piefed and donate to them.
It's too bad they won't allow funding to go towards development of just the software itself, separately from the moderation and other costs of maintaining Lemmy.ml. As it is, Lemmy is a tankie platform first and foremost, and only secondarily offered for use by the rest of the world. You can see this in the development philosophy even: like even Reddit offers a modmail, notification upon moderation events, and ability to see deleted posts (PieFed offers some of this too), though Lemmy offers strong rights to instance admins, and somewhat lessened ones for moderators, but significantly weaker privileges to mere users (who I guess they feel don't deserve to be told upon e.g. being banned from an instance, and instead merely have to find out the hard way?).
Be careful not to use up your voting rations.
I vote all day without running into limits.
Piefed is problematic in its own ways, just FYI. I don’t know what it is about fediverse devs and trying to insert themselves as supermods, but the two seem to be strongly correlated.
I find Piefed to be much less problematic than Lemmy which is why I use Piefed and not Lemmy.
How is Piefed problematic? Honestly asking - the only "controversy" I've witnessed was about the list of default instances.
I know Rimu has some really weird opinions about how a social media network should be designed, such as believing that the 90-9-1 rule should be prevented and being against memes, and tends to be overly pushy about implementing these """features""". That said, so far as I'm aware, its not so much problematic as just stupid design decisions.
Adding to this: a lot of the most heinous, truly "problematic" stuff ended up being demonstrably false accusations - like a feature may be opt-in, or at worst opt-out, but either of those is a far cry from being hard-coded as was claimed.
That said, the software truly is "opinionated", pushing its own agenda even if you can opt-out of most of it - an instance admin still has to be wary of each new feature added, especially with the lack of transparency surrounding the announcements.
Although personally I think Lemmy is equally opinionated, just more in the sense of what features it decides not to implement at all.
Both platforms have their advantages, and it seems more important for an end-user to pick a good admin team that reflects their values more than picking a platform, especially if using a 3rd-party app than replaces the UI anyway. (Though secondary to that, I do think PieFed has the strongest edge, especially right now before the release of Lemmy 1.0.)
What theee
Never knew something was wrong about lemmy.ml, it's not moderated here on my server. But it often has duplicate communities with .world and they are of comparable sizes
A lot of the moderation that causes users public grief are usually just timeouts. Arguments over politics and ideology, etc quite often catch folks a timeout. Folks will debate a two day ban for a week.
And with the Fediverse: many community moderators are also admins of instances.
So with that in mind: moderation policies quickly convert drama between users to drama between instances.
Including OP's too:-). Except lemmy.ml, obviously.
Tbh i made this account through the browsing app i use and am still pretty baby, im only kind of sure what defederated instance even means but I didnt wanna ask stupid questions :')
To add to what Vicinus said, it's like when people get divorced - it's a breakdown of communication between instances, a means of last resort. Here is a recent example when your instance defederated from Lemmy.org:
due to lack of moderation on their side. This instance has open registrations, seemingly zero abuse prevention on signup, including not requiring emails. This leads to a small number of people constantly creating new disposable accounts for various types of abuse with zero consequences. Their admin is the CEO of an ad company, which surely doesn’t affect incentives. They do virtually zero moderation, allowing all these abusive accounts to rampantly harass other instances...
We, as well as other people, including at least one admin of another instance, have attempted to reach out to them about their lack of moderation, but we haven’t received any response at all. At this point there isn’t really anything left besides defederating them, which several other instances have already done as well.
Or here is the historical statement about defederation from Hexbear: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330, though those links are very old and probably not functional anymore.
It's like when someone repeatedly sends you unsolicited spam, even after you beg and plead with them to stop, and so as a last resort you finally block them. Incels arguing against it claim that their right to speak should triumph over your right to not have to listen but... that is simply not true.
My understanding, using the federation-email analogy, defederation is like yahoo mail and gmail users not being able to send and receive emails from each other. In this case lemmy.world and lemmy.ml can't see each others users/communities/posts/comments/votes (someone can correct me if I'm mistaken about any part).
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz just made a post about instance defederations. TL:DR of the post is only 3 instances/servers have any significant defederation (>5%). 2 "tankie" instances (lemmygrad.ml [67%] and hexbear.net [64%]) and the porn instance (fedinsfw.app [13%]).
Most of the hobby instances I like are mastodon instances. I particularly like dice.camp, the ttrpg instance.
Just browse by /all...
When you see stuff you don't like, block it.
When you see stuff you like, subscribe to it.
so if there are instances with a bad history or full of chuds or something a heads up would be swell
Honestly?
Just dive on in.
There's a lot of places that are horrible, but don't seem like it at first. But figuring it out for yourself is a learning experience, and isn't just blindly trusting someone else who you don't know.
Most instances have open modlogs, but there's also accounts that weaponize that and ban people from communities they've never been in. What the modlog is very useful, is mod accountability. First time wandering into a new place, it doesn't hurt to look at the log and see what type of vibe but has.
Most of the time the mods should be removing the "last straw" comment to preserve it in the log, then banning the account. However in practice most mods (even me, not throwing shade) will just click "perm ban" and "remove all content".
Because none of this is actually that serious. If mods took it as serious as some users want, they burn out and crash out like that dude who built a hidden blocklist into his front end without telling anyone.
Can't give too many fucks about this stuff.
My instance has a decent list is communities btw if you'd like to find some to subscribe to. A few others might have lists as well.
https://slrpnk.net/communities
There's also !newcommunities@lemmy.world
And a shout out to my own community, !nolawns@slrpnk.net (yes I do run the Reddit one as well)
This is perfect thank you!!
I think Lemmy.ca has a community promo community as well but for some reason I can't find it now.
pics, youcantparktheremate, historyphotos, cats, autism@lemmy.world
overall there's not a lot here relative to reddit. as a warning, lemmy.ml is a community centered around pro-communist/anti-capitalist ideology, and some there can get hostile to people who don't share their beliefs.
Im guessing pics here is probably a lot better with the big decrease in bot traffic, i was so used to automatically unsubbing from that one I forgot it was an option here :')
I'm a problem masturbator.
Try using both hands
Like you masturbating is the problem or you masturbate problems?
Correct.
If you provide some of your interests/hobbies, we can probably be more helpful.
That being said, I think these are a few active and interesting communities:
Regarding places to avoid, I don't think anyplace needs to be avoided, per say. Politics can be problematic, if you go into those posts.
There's no real algorithm, so you need to curate your own feed. In general, I'd suggest, if you see a community that could interest you, just subscribe. You can always unsubscribe later (if it turns out not to be what you want), but getting a denser "good stuff" home feed is beneficial.
By the same token, I'd suggest blocking communities you have zero interest in (helps filtering, so you come across more content you are interested in when browsing "All"). If you run into a problematic user, report (if they have done something reportable), block, and move on.
If 2 communities are posting the same content and you get tired of seeing double, I'd suggest removing the community from the bigger or flagship instance (ex. Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Piefed.Social).
This would have the effect of distributing the communities across the threadiverse rather than having them bunch up on a few. A problem with bunching can be if an instance goes down, they take their users/communities with them. Most of the medium/large instances in the threadiverse are stable, but it has happened in the past (Lemm.ee).
My understanding is this should be much less of a problem in the future, they are working on making user profiles and communities transferable between instances/servers.
Note: there is an active autism community, if that's of interest to you.
Yeah sorry I realized it might have been a bit vague, I dont mind lurking in areas where it isnt even my specific hobby or interest because it can be kinda neat to peek into what other people are interested in, I've been recommended some great gardening/science/climate ones but Im wondering if there's going to be anything like hobbydrama or cursedcrochet or wunkus. Im gonna miss wunkus :(
Thank you!
No worries :)
The threadiverse (roughly the reddit-like part of the fediverse) is pretty small (~43k MAU), so if something doesn't exist and you want it to, your probably going to have to start and build it yourself.
I was kind of off-put by that initially, but I kind of like it now. It's kind of like building your own little space and people can come check it out and see what you've been building and contribute if they feel like it. I created fedilytics (Fediverse-Analytics) a couple months ago because I was curious how the fediverse was doing. It's not particularly active with other people (got first non-me post yesterday!), but I mostly built it for myself and enjoy anytime someone stops in to talk in the comments.
If you do decide to make a community in the future, I'd suggest making the post in the community and then cross-posting it, to a larger relevant community, to increase traffic to your post (as many people just stick to their subscribed feed).
!dullsters@dullsters.net
It's like a community of Hank Hills there and I wouldn't have it any other way.
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu