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?
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.)
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.