My experience began in earnest when I launched Matapacos, though I had dabbled earlier. Overall, it has been pretty positive. At first, I was worried about catching the ire of the mega-instances, but as time went on, I found that the vast majority of cool people that I end up following aren't domiciled there anyway. The same will turn out for Lemmy in the long run, but the Lemmy network is nowhere near as mature (politically) as the Fediverse itself. Things will be volatile for a bit. The whole federation / defederation war will burn out at some point, and communities will develop on either side of the wall.
footnote
By mature (politically) I don't mean that it has universally good politics, but that it is less volatile and that many people have transcended the initial stage of "go to the big instance" to finding an instance which aligns with their trade / craft / politics / interests.
We just pulled the plug on mastodon.world (175,141 accounts) and it only severed 56 follows (total, for all users on the instance, incoming + outgoing). Averaged out, 1 out of 3 users lost ONE person from their follow list.
My experience began in earnest when I launched Matapacos, though I had dabbled earlier. Overall, it has been pretty positive. At first, I was worried about catching the ire of the mega-instances, but as time went on, I found that the vast majority of cool people that I end up following aren't domiciled there anyway. The same will turn out for Lemmy in the long run, but the Lemmy network is nowhere near as mature (politically) as the Fediverse itself. Things will be volatile for a bit. The whole federation / defederation war will burn out at some point, and communities will develop on either side of the wall.
footnote
By mature (politically) I don't mean that it has universally good politics, but that it is less volatile and that many people have transcended the initial stage of "go to the big instance" to finding an instance which aligns with their trade / craft / politics / interests.
We just pulled the plug on mastodon.world (175,141 accounts) and it only severed 56 follows (total, for all users on the instance, incoming + outgoing). Averaged out, 1 out of 3 users lost ONE person from their follow list.