I did hear of Lemmy first, with immediate criticism about supporting the CCP and so on. The second alternative mentioned on Reddit was kbin which is where I went first.

Unfortunately kbin runs on PHP and you can really feel the site lagging at times, no clue why someone would port a stable Rust code base to this mess. lemmy.ml is lighting fast in comparison and has working federation.

I did also try sh.itjust.works as an alternative Lemmy instance (which would be nice as it blocks lemmygrad.ml), but it’s in Canada and I’m in Europe, so the latency is noticeable.

So now I’m here, oh well.