So, the instance I joined Lemmy on last week largely to participate here defederated from lemmy.world an hour ago. It’s early post-Reddit days, which is the only reason I’m posting a general tech tip in /r/!austin, but it’s a previously impossible inconvenience that isn’t theoretical. Choose wisely or start your collection of alts early!
As someone who is going to move a subreddit over to Lemmy, this is a really good idea. I could just host that one on my own, and if I don’t add people to my server, I could make sure that it doesn’t get overloaded. People could connect from other federated servers to view and make posts/comments.
That’s what StarTrek has done. The various StarTrek subs have closed permanently on Reddit and all moved together to their own Lemmy instance, startrek.website.
Yeah, I imagine that’s the equilibrium that the Lemmy Fediverse kind of lands on. At least for subs with more technical mods. I do wonder if this is sufficiently complex that Lemmy, and the Fediverse, in general, stays fairly niche as most users won’t consider that super amazing user experience. But, to me, that’s kind of the interesting and fun part – what happens next in the Fediverse experiment.
In my case I am the sole mod, and pretty much 99.99% of the time the only person posting content. Plenty of people subscribed, and they are very active with comments, but it’s a small sub and very niche to begin with. So moving to a niche platform sounds like the right thing to do at the moment. I have spoken with the person running the node I am on and he is cool with me moving it there. But if things start having issues, like I am not comfortable with the direction that node is taking, I will start looking into starting my own up, and just keeping it simple and small. I might just spin up a new server here to see what I can come up with, but there’s a lot to it, and spare time lately just isn’t there.