Okay, it’s actually 18955 at the time of this post. I’m looking at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and lemmy.world has already passed beehaw.org by a large margin for second place.
Can’t wait for this place to start filling out!
I mean, sure some are probably people making multiple accounts, but based on the speed of new posts showing up I’d believe there are at least 20k on lemmy.world. It’s the largest and most stable instance at the moment.
Personally I run my own instance and connect to the communities from there.
Hello 👋 new to fediverse - what are the benefits of running your own and connecting in to these communities, compared to just making an account on an instance that already exists?
I imagine if you run your own, you don’t lose access to your account compared to if, say, your account is in lemmy.world and it goes down. Is there more to it?
That’s pretty much it for me. There’s a lot of complexity in hosting that you don’t have to do if you use someone else’s instance. There’s a risk that their server goes down, but most people who start big servers know what they’re doing.
Its also advantageous to join the instance you want to interact most in. Interacting across instances is possible but still a little buggy. It’s harder to find communities, and once you do, sometimes posts don’t load.
In addition to that,
- I like the challenge of leaning new technologies and hosting my own web apps
- It lets me feel that I have a bit more control over my user and posts
- I get my own vanity domain / user address
- I get a good understanding of how the lemmy frontend, backend and database work (yay open-source!)
- I can keep my instance up to date with the latest lemmy releases (some are still running 0.17.3!)
- I can do some dev work and testing on my instance, if I want, without impacting others
- it reduces load on the main instances
There’s more, but I think that’s a good enough list for now. Have a nice day!
