Another fresh Lemmy user here running for refuge from the Reddit collapse. Although in my case, before my 3rd party app got shut down I got permabanned from Reddit for daring to report obvious bot accounts reposting and interacting in bad faith… sigh.

This federated system is a little confusing, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. First time I’ve seen a mobile forum web interface not suck.

I suppose some lingering questions I have so far is

  • In the mobile site, how tf do I filter to specific communities for a more “reddit-Esque” curated front page? Right now it’s dumping EVERY post from every currently federated instance, and that’s quickly becoming a lot of content.
  • is running your own instance, to keep with the “email” analogy, preferable at this early stage in Lemmy’s growth? As I understand, it really helps with server load.
  • I’m considering making my own instance to focus on cars and trucks discussion , with internal communities dedicated to each brand similar to those on Reddit. However I’m not sure how to find out if an instance like that already exists. Google searching seems to return poor results for Lemmy instances at this stage. Is there some dedicated Lemmy community for advertising instances? And is advertising instances by sharing content considered “bad practice”?
  • Are the hardware requirements for a smaller Lemmy instance very high? I admittedly haven’t done that much research on it yet so please roast me for this question. I like to own my own hardware, so I have an Orange Pi 5, 8GB with a 512gb SSD I would commit to the instance if I can get my routing situation figured out.
  • Can registered accounts be transferred to a different instance?

Thanks everyone! Let’s hope this service can really take off in the future.

  • Nerd02English
    3•1 year ago

    Hi, welcome on board from one refugee to another. Yeah federations are indeed a bit confusing to wrap your head around. I like to think I’ve figured it out, but who knows…

    1. Not sure I understood what you mean. Can’t you just subscribe to the communities you care about? It’d be like joining a subreddit.
    2. Yes.
    3. Not sure if there are any better sites for this, personally I use https://browse.feddit.de/
    4. It should be pretty lightweight, though if you don’t have lots of RAM your user experience might be hurt a bit. I’ll relay this to the guy who’s hosting my instance, I’m not sure which config he’s rocking. But personally mine feels overloaded at times, so whatever I’ve got you might want a little more than that. Anyway, if you like the idea of owning the metal that’s fine but know that you can easily host a decently sized lemmy on a VPS for less than $10.
    5. Not that I know of, each instance has its own database where everything is contained. Posts and comments are synced among instrances using ActivityPub but I believe accounts only live on one server. In order to do that you’d need to manually access the database on both instances.