I created my account like one hour ago and never received the validation mail. Is it normal (like a queue running during the night or so)?

So, as many here, I joined Lemmy two years ago following the reddit change regarding their API policy. I always have been rather open-source enthusiast (even though that I became less extreme with years and professional computer science experience, as a student I was a bit more utopist), so Lemmy seemed to me the perfect replacement.

I was not disappointed and, as an end-user, I still enjoy Lemmy better than I had ever liked reddit. However, during the two years that I have been using Lemmy and the grow of the user base, l experienced two instances shutdown, my first one shutdown overnight without any warning and, just now, lemm.ee is shutting down because moderation become unmanageable for instance admins.

So this bring me to my point, since reaction to posts about lemm.ee shutdown, I hear a lot speaking about piefed. Is piefed somehow better than lemmy? Is it right that lemmy communities are accessible through piefed? What are arguments for switching to piefed or to remain on lemmy?

Do you know any good threads, blog post, whatever discussing this, that can help me figure out?

I used Voyager for more than 1 year, I’m happy with it but I will try out summit because I like trying alternatives.

Thank you for the welcome. I chose lemmy.zip because the policy regarding defederation pleased me and the monthly update on the status of the server was great info.

I hope this instance last a bit longer than my two previous ones (vlemmy.net which disappeared overnight, then lemm.ee).

One small detail about your sidebar, you have alternative UI, that’s a great plus. I would just name the software project running it next to the URL and Photon (m.lemmy.zip) is described as a mobile centric UI but it works great also on desktop (personally it’s my UI of choice on desktop).

I just started Never Flinch, by Stephen King. I’m an absolute fan of Stephen King, so I couldn’t not start reading it.

I chose lemmy.zip at the end. I hope this one will stay longer (I started on vlemmy.net which was put offline without notice and then I switched to lemm.ee…).