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Neither
Reason: Smaller instances will often run better, and also the whole point of the fediverse is not being centralized
But how do you reliably find large active communities? I’m still new around here! Like if I’m into movie discussions, how do I know if I picked one that has like 5 subs on some obscure small instance vs one with a big subscriber base.
Check out lemmyverse.net/communities, it'll let you search (almost) everything without being limited by your instance, and you can sort by whatever criteria you want.
As someone new to all this, thank you so much!!
No worries! Feel free to ask if there's anything else you're still hung up on.
Thank you!
My favorite way is browsing all (that includes all that are federated with the instance) and subing to communities I like
Subscribe to both with the understanding that the communities are still much smaller than on Reddit.
Look for them! The instance you're on has minimal limitations to where you can interact (barring defederation)
Here is a site with information about Lemmy, https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Here's a site that gives details on instance populations, general rules, functionality, and reliability. https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. This site is a couple weeks out of date, but gives a good look into what each instance allows.