Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
Basically the main difference is who your admin team is. So that means different moderation styles, allowing NSFW or not, allowing downvotes, controlling which communities get made (or not), etc.
You can create communities on your home instance if your admins allow it (Lemmy.ml and Kbin do, Beehaw does not). But you have to make an account on an instance to create a community there.
It’s totally reasonable to jump between instances until you find one you like.
I’m on beehaw right now and didn’t realize creating communities was disabled. Very interesting. Thanks!