Yes. Welcome.
The thing about Lemmy (or feddit.uk) is that it's federated so you don't need to worry about whether anyone is "here" as you have access to the rest of the instances across the fediverse. It's still early days but there's a fair number of active communities.
I'm still trying to get a better understanding/comprehension of what the federated system really means in practice.
I guess it's not just about the fact you can access the other instances, but rather about who is looking at said instances (therefore active in the wider community).
If we can have people posting and interacting across instances, can we have communities federating as well so that you have a shared feed? Otherwise you risk having multiple small community pockets that can't hit a critical mass for content.
Similarly, I'd imagine instance ownership and ownership philosophy is quite important and choosing the wrong instance for your community could have potentially disastrous consequences?
I think that's more the questions I was thinking of ๐
You are generally right.
Choosing an instance is less important on Lemmy than Mastodon (where communities have a greater sense of identity and there are issues about whether or not an instance federates with ones it doesnโt like - big debate about allowing Threads to federate at the moment).
Iโm terms of having multiple competing communities, Reddit was always like this and I used to subscribe to essentially the same ones but run by different mods. I guess it becomes survival of the fittest so the communities that are most active grow. Like the early days of Reddit, there are LOTS of communities being created with no content. Itโll either settle down or people will abandon Lemmy for something else.
can we have communities federating as well so that you have a shared feed? Otherwise you risk having multiple small community pockets that canโt hit a critical mass for content.
It's not that big a deal and we should have the equivalent of multireddits eventually. So, for example, there are half a dozen Casual UK communities on Lemmy but you will eventually be able to create a multicommunity, so you are getting all of them in one feed and it doesn't really matter which instance a post is on.
!slide@feddit.uk is being ported over and still has multireddits in its interface.
Similarly, Iโd imagine instance ownership and ownership philosophy is quite important and choosing the wrong instance for your community could have potentially disastrous consequences?
Not that disastrous and you'll eventually have the ability to move to another instance, as you can on Mastodon (there are currently tools that let you copy over your account to a new account on another instance).
The big issue is if you are on an instance that has defederated from a lot of others, so you lose access to some communities. This hasn't happened a lot and is largely done to keep out trolls and bots (some instances are already posting statements explaining who is defederated and why). Tom has said he'll use defederation sparingly on here, which is a good thing.
One interesting angle I'd not considered, but have heard it from people moving here and elsewhere from lemmy.world, is that that instance is too big. lemmy.world is the size of all the other instances combined and, especially at times of migration, it can be slower. Also their "all" feed is now getting very much like the front page of Reddit and is unmanageable. Here it is easy enough to skim and get up to speed, using the subscriptions to bring in only what you want to see and you get a pretty nicely curated feed, where there you are sticking your head into a firehose of content.
Worth noting that Feddit.uk has:
Perhaps you could speak to the other mods and combine your efforts - you can all jointly moderate one.
edit: you have the first mover advantage and the spelling one.
Yeah I didn't actually make this one, just saw it in the community list ๐ it also has the advantage of being the same as r/nufc which is quite active.
Ah, I should have spotted you weren't a moderator.
This one is handy as it can be found by anyone searching for "nufc" or "newcastleunited".