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That's the beauty of multiple instances. As long as people push heading to join-lemmy.org over any one particular instance, things should be mostly okay.
I signed up from prgrmaming.dev and I really like the function of being able to sign up within a different community that you can choose.
Yep, if they can find a smaller, specialised, or localised instance it is better for the network for them to join that and learn to subscribe to others rather than lumping on one big server.
It's just a little awkward for new users to subscribe and navigate across instances at the moment, but new features and "gasp" third party apps can make that easier.
On the other hand sending people to a list of servers that includes stuff like lemmygrad and yiffit pretty high on the list is... a potential turnoff
There is https://lemmyverse.net/ as an alternative, I don't see any immediately shady communities in the top of the listing. Though it does put lemmy.ml as #1, which isn't ideal since it'd probably draw a lot of people right to it.
I prefer https://lemmyverse.net