I think I sort of understand in theory how instances and the communities work, but I am confused about how it works in practice. I'll hopefully figure it out in time. I signed up via reddthat, so as long as they stay federated... I should still be able to see everything and do everything and have my comments be seen by everyone? Right?
I signed my mum up for Reddit 6 years ago and she's a daily user of that (lmao I help her with subreddits and try to help her not fall into weird rabbit holes, but over all she just looks at cat pictures and fun things) but I don't think she'd manage Lemmy. Maybe, if there were already more communities and more posts related to her interests, and I set Lemmy up for her, and nothing ever changed about how she would learn to use Lemmy. But I think just the nature of Lemmy - it's too new and the idea of instances and how they are federated is too confusing for now. Or maybe I just need to understand it better myself.
Yeah, I don't think lemmy is ready for very casual users like that yet at least, I've been here for 3 years on different accounts, and the difference in the last month or so has been staggering :)
Most notable is that there are way more people discussing, there are tons of more content, more instances, so basically just more, there are still things that are missing like really niche stuff that I really used to enjoy over on reddit, like r/shorthand, and r/sudoku and so on, but we'll have to se :) Maybe we will grow to a size where that is possible.
You are correct about how federation works, for example I'm on an instance that I've spun up myself and everyone on here can still comment on threads that are not from my instance, and everyone else sees it so long as they haven't specifically blocked my instance (which AFAIK no one has yet, and I'd like to keep it that way of course).
Ah, making your own instance is a really good idea! Then you're not at the mercy of others. Very cool! I might think about doing something similar at some point.