All good points.
Faster than .zip? Perhaps. But when I moved from lemmy.sdf.org to lemm.ee I went back to using SDF several times because .ee would have major slowdowns. Which is weird because of how hands off the SDF admins seem to be. Perhaps the performance has more to do with network location and resources allocated to the server?
Exactly. People will have different definitions of “good”.
The main instance I found to replace lemm.ee was lemmy.zip. They seem to be well-regarded, well-admined, and appear to have a similar (de)federation philosophy as lemm.ee. In other words, they are widely federated in both directions, which is an increasing rarity on the “threadiverse” (Lemmy and other similar federated discussion software). One interesting thing they do is that in place of completely defederating some of the more controversial instances like hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, they pre-emptively block those instances for new users instead. I feel that this is absolutely the correct middle-ground approach as it leaves the choice with the user (edit: while still hiding the controversial instances from new users).
Edit: I have learned that reddthat.com only defederates from threads.net, and it seems that lemmy.ml is not defederated from any major instances as far as I can tell, so I’ve removed it from the list below.
The other instances that still federate widely including those two controversial instances have some other issues:
Ah, yes, I can understand that. I remember reading about all the issues that .world was having in the early days. Good to hear you like .zip though.