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?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.)

[–] pyrojoe 6 points 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.

[–] starkcommando 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've been debating hosting my own instance. Are you hosting on a cloud platform or a home server?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am not the author of the upper comment, but I am running on a home server (a raspberry Pi), I can provide you my docker-compose!

[–] meekah 6 points 1 year ago

Not the person who asked, but that would be awesome!

[–] starkcommando 2 points 1 year ago

Definitely interested in your docker-compose!

[–] meekah 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] starkcommando 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From what I've read, account transfers are not available yet but it is on Lemmy's roadmap.

[–] meekah 2 points 1 year ago

I see, thank you!