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You mean they don't let you rules lawyer? The horror!

Lemmy.ml is right-out funny with its decisions sometimes, especially when it comes to politics. Write a couple of paragraphs of policital analysis going very much against tankie grain and use the word "muppet" once, "Deleted: Be polite". Meanwhile, people around you are throwing slurs at each other. Wisen up and avoid that and you'll get temporarily banned for "disinfo" for repeating something out loud that was written in the thread's article: No, Ukraine does not lay claim to the Russian territories it officially describes as "historically Ukrainian-speaking". The article said so, Ukraine says so, and never said anything else either.

Rules are only as good as the mods enforcing them, it's as simple as that.

Oh no, really? That's awful...

Federation is open by default but I never post anything to my home instance because no one is there. If I started posting on my own instance other people could theoretically subscribe to my communities the same way I subscribe to communities on other instances but since there are only two users on my instance it's pretty unlikely people would find it without me crossposting somewhere.

Benefits of me running my own instance are that I control my own user account and I'm not at the whims of another admin. I subscribe to content on lots of other instances and it all federates into mine which means I've been able to browse content when some of the big instances go down. I've got my own entrypoint to lemmy which feels a bit more neutral than choosing another instance to be 'home' for my user.

Downsides are that I have to pay for and maintain it myself which can sometimes be a serious pain. Because my instance only has two users my 'all' feed is basically a copy of my 'subscribed' feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don't. That can make it hard to find new content without using something like lemmyverse.net.

If you're thinking about hosting your own instance I encourage you to give it a shot. I'd highly recommend the lemmy-ansible project on github which is both a guide and playbook for deploying the various lemmy docker containers using ansible. I'm a sysadmin by trade so running services like this is something I'm pretty familiar with but I've still found myself frustrated by Lemmy more than once. It's still a young project and can be frustratingly brittle and difficult to troubleshoot. That being said it's been a great learning experience and makes me feel like I'm doing my part to contribute to a better and more decentralized web.

Nothing manual required, you can federate with any other instance as long as you're not on their ban list.

You basically use your instance's search to search for a community on the remote instance, then your instance requests the top (5?) posts from the community on the remote instance. Once a user subscribes, all new posts going forward will be sent to your server via the federation.

At least I think that's how it works, haha.

They're not the only one!

Thanks for making me check, I'm actually just banned from that one community.

The problem with the smaller instances is that there's less support and it's more likely to shut down.

Also Canadian and on renewable energy.

yeah and we get to have profile pics and pictures in comments, which isn't on instances like lemm.ee