I had some luck with the prebuilt images from dessalines' dockerhub and using the compose file in the repo with logging commented out.
It was stable for about a week before I tried to update and broke my database and federation completely. I might try again when 0.18 stable drops.
A lot of niche communities haven't jumped over in big numbers yet, we're still in the phase where everyone has to congregate in the "general" communities. As those grow I think we'll get the same thing we saw on reddit where niche communities splinter off when they start to overtake the conversation.
I had a very similar experience, my lemmy.ml account is about a year old and I bounced off it several times because of a lack of content and engagement. But now I think it'll stick, thanks spez.
As a user on kbin you can block a whole domain. That definitely works on the post level and I would assume the comment level as well but I haven't tested that part.
This is what I used with my more technically friends and family. I think its really intuitive with the community/magazine url format <community>@<domain>.