This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
Might be a silly question, but: does ActivityPub support setting up a subinstance that gets its data from somewhere else? Traditionally you'd probably do that with a pgsql machine and multiple frontends, but having thought about it while typing this out, putting that load on the ActivityPub protocol would mean loading up the master to much the same extent as just having the traffic hit the master directly...
You can setup a new instance (or join an existing one), then follow remote communities you are interested in. All the content will get mirrored over time, and you can interact with it seamlessly.
I’m not clear on how that works. Are you saying that each Lemmy instance hosts the content from every other Lemmy instance?
Yes federation mirrors the text content on each instance where it is visible. Images are only hosted on the original instance.
So there's no way to delete a comment you make, across the board? There will always be a copy of it somewhere?
Deletions are federated. But in a distributed system there is no guarantee that it will be deleted everywhere.