Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
I had some problems subscribing to non-local communities - especially the search never worked, didn’t matter if I paste in the URL or the !community@server notation. still I somehow managed to join most of them, but only after trying and playing around for some time.
this part definitely needs some work, but the concept is well with it imho - and as currently new contributors start to join, this could grow quite nicely.
I still don’t really know, if every instance needs to mirror the posts/comments of other instances, when I’m subscribed to their community, or only the data gets forwarded - or directly linked?
so I’m not sure what the costs of running a small instance would be, if my users would subscribe to larger communities on other instances - that would be hard to finance for instances with small user bases