This is my first time on any kind of federated network. It's pretty neat. I've known about federated projects for a while, but with Mastodon being the most popular one, and with me never having an interest in Twitter to begin with, I never bothered.
I'm the type to want to run it myself instead of joining a public instance, and I have to say, this isn't half bad at all. Wasn't hard to set up, and isn't as resource intensive as I was expecting.
I see a lot of potential in Lemmy, but I don't think it can really "go big" without some significant, but hopefully manageable, improvements to how it works. You can read me ramble about my thoughts here. I'm crossing my fingers that the exodus from Reddit brings some extra attention to Lemmy's GitHub.