I’m one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.

I’m not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.

I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there…and that’s it.

But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?

I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?

You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there’s one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that’s where I’m subscribing.

How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?

  • aranym@lemmy.nameEnglish
    101·
    1 year ago

    I personally host my own instance, from which I interact with communities on many other instances.

    This ensures my Lemmy account can’t just be decimated because my admin decided to stop maintaining their instance and I avoid defederation that can block content I’m interested in (including the infighting among larger instances.)

    • silly goose meekah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah that’s what I’m planning to do as well. Do you know if there’s a way to transfer my current lenny.world account to my private instance, whenever I get around to it?

    • pyrojoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Out of curiosity, what’s the disk usage from hosting your own instance like? My concern with self hosting is it’ll quickly run out of control. I don’t want to dedicate hundreds of gigabytes to a lemmy instance.