On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.

On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance

History of LW controversial decisions

when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it's still in !politics@lemmy.world )
when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )

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[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed.

Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.

That's probably good for Mastodon, but for Lemmy there isn't so much choice. My rule of thumb, in order is

lemm.ee
sh.itjust.works if you are ok with the name
discuss.tchncs.de or lemmy.ca depending if you are located in Europe or North America
lemmy.zip as they are good contenders, but a bit smaller than the others

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Any reasons for choosing discuss.tchncs.de over feddit.de?

Edit: Oh wait, is feddit.de down? Have they been having issues recently?

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 year ago

Now you understand 😄

They have a strange issue with their frontend, the instance is still running, and can be accessed using other front ends, but as you can see, not the best experience for a new joiner