this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Thank you for such a long writeup to my simple question. I would definitely love to selfhost my own little lemmy instance someday in the future. It never made sense to me that this place was automatically better when it's just technically someone else's servers.
Well, there truly is a trickle down effect there: there is only one Reddit, but there are many instances running ~~Reddit 2.0~~ Lemmy, and several running Mbin or PieFed instead. So as a user, if you do not like Reddit, there aren't really any good alternatives (read a book, Twitter/X or like Bluesky or Mastodon or GameFAQs or such, maybe touch grass, etc.:-), but if you do not enjoy a Lemmy, you can shuffle over to another one, or even start your own.
What I said above is just the beauty of any generic Free and Open Source Software to run or be a user on a forum, but beyond that, the Federation model of sharing content via the ActivityPub protocol allows you to work with the identically same data from the new place as you would have from the old - more or less. e.g. if you get booted from Lemmy.ml and make a lemmy.world account then you could access the same communities on lemmy.ml, with the new account (although being careful this time not to cross the unwritten rules, including for ban evasion). Moving from Reddit to X doesn't allow that, but moving from a Lemmy instance to another Lemmy, or Mbin or PieFed, does.
So there is that tiny amount of freedom, which nonetheless still sets it apart from corporate non-FOSS Reddit, by virtue of the Federation model:-). The Fediverse software is quite resource intensive, depending on amount of network utilization, but widely considered to be better than isolated forum software for this reason of its interconnectedness:-).