Apollo going away was the catalyst for me. I will never use Reddit’s garbage website or first-party app.

Plus Lemmy gave me an excuse to host another neat service and still waste the same time I did on Reddit.

I tend to spend way too much on electronics. Constant PC upgrades, new disks for my NAS, better monitors, etc. I do at least allocate a monthly budget for this, but go over it sometimes…

Food delivery is another high category for me, and I’ve been trying to cut back, but it’s soooooo convenient.

Doesn’t bother me if subreddits don’t want to protest. The whole point of an online community is that you can have groups with different opinions, needs, etc. Nobody is forcing them to go dark.

I’ve been running on All - New to get a feed of everything currently indexed on my instance. Active seems to be moving pretty slowly, so I probably need to go index a bunch more communities.

Yes it should run perfectly fine on a Pi, at least for a small instance. You will need to get ports forwarded or setup a reverse proxy if hosting at home, since you’ll need to generate a valid SSL cert (i.e. Letsencrypt) to be able to connect to the federation

The distributed nature of Lemmy should make things more manageable. Personally, I’m running an instance on a dedicated machine I already pay for, so it’s not costing me anything unless storage skyrockets. Many other instance hosts are also hobbyists that don’t mind covering the costs, and may take some form of donations locally on their sidebars.

There probably should be a built-in feature for instance admins to enable a local donation button to contribute to their costs, though. While Lemmy is fairly resource-efficient, larger instances are eventually going to require pretty beefy VMs to keep up with the traffic, image uploads, etc. I could see some instances randomly vanishing when their owners can’t/don’t keep up with their bills (which would force users over to other instances), but ideally if any instance owners can’t afford to cover it, they hand control over to another community member to pick it up.

Yeah, I had 13 years on reddit so it was a nice run. Seems like every online platform dies at some point, so it was going to happen sooner or later.

Search is the one thing Lemmy needs to focus on right away, current search sucks and will run off lots of Reddit refugees their first day.

As of right now, a user in your instance has to search and/or sub to a community from another instance before it gets indexed. You could make some dummy account and sub to hundreds of remote communities so they’re locally indexed without having to sub to them on your main account, but that’s pretty time consuming and still not a great solution.