There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven’t seen it made often.
Let’s just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That’s to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
It’s not clear where most of them are based. I am an American living in Czechia. I don’t see any Czech language ones (though I’d be using mostly English anyway), so my assumption is that there aren’t any in Czechia, which is likely wrong and just based on lack of info.
As a bubble-ensconced expat you’re likely in a different category!
But sure. My proposal is that if you sign up from a Czech IP, you get pushed to whatever’s the most local server with more than X active users, or X recent uptime ratio, for example.