Lots of people are trying to get away from Reddit but don't know exactly where to go. Usually the first recommendation is to just create an account on the bigger instances (e.g, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, kbin.social), but this strategy has some problems:
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These instances are already overloaded with the first influx and they are trying to point newcomers to other instances.
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New people are creating communities on multiple instances, because they haven't fully grasped how federation works.
Another approach (specially for self-hosters) would be to setup your own instance. This also has some disadvantages.
- For those that want to federate, it would mean that they would need to have their servers on the public net.
- If the instance is setup only for a handful of users, then by definition it would be only useful as some point of "entrypoint" to the different communities. It wouldn't be a place conducive to host new communities.
With that in mind, my idea with this instance would be to use it as the home of the discussion groups, but not necessarily as the home of the people themselves. In other words, I wouldn't expect a lot of users in this instance except for the mods and admins. Thanks to federation, those that want to follow and participate in the communities here can do so from their accounts on any other remote instance
This is not to say that I am planning to kick out any non-mod. There is also value in letting people try out this new world of federated systems without feeling pressured into choosing the "right" instance. I just think that once people understand they can follow the communities here from any place, then eventually they will find out they have other interests and they will be looking for more generic instances where members are not tied to an specific identity.