A very valid question I am also interested in knowing. I’m wondering how much management it will be for me - who created his own instance and am having to find all the other communities myself. Or if my instance is doing anything but providing me a unique instance address and name.

Based on the bit of research I have done, along with creating https://lemmyonline.com/

It seems you are correct. A small handful of servers contains roughly 95% of the user-base.

I think the intended way for this to work, certain communities can be hosted on their own servers. However, it appears most of the popular communities migrating away from reddit, all flocked to lemmy.world, which is likely contributing to it being overloaded.

I've suggested a routing protocol to the lemmy devs - to use federated instances to route all the messages to other federated instances. The idea was received with some interest, but it seems that people believe that there's still a ton of performance that can be squeezed out from the current architecture through optimisations.

I just spun up my own instance as well and it does feel a bit like I'm just pulling from the biggest instances and feeding my own without really being able to give much back.

Does anyone have any idea what specs are required to run alemmy server, how about the "big" ones at the moment, just to get an idea of the scale of the challenge?

Since Lemmy instance are not backed by commercial interest, but rather by nice volunteers and donors that have money and time to spare, they will be heavily affected by economic downturns (we still can see commercial interests still affect users negatively tho with reddit). Here are my thoughts on the matter:

• as far as I understand the owner of the domain: https://lemmy.world even has to pay for this fancy domain name in the DNS system ... every month subscription service style
  • (and tbh I hate the Domain name system) why should I fund it with my own money?
  • if you hosted with an onion site over tor that expenditure would not exist, but how would users discover your site then? Let me know if you know something about this
• in times of deflation (meaning money becomes worth more, spending some money on a self hosted lemmy instance becomes nonsensical)
• tbh if I hosted a lemmy instance and the users of my instance posted high quality content in quantity I would use it to train my own LLM, that would at least create some economic incentive for me to host such a page ... but managing spam and bots will be HARD

That is why you should always back up your comments on your personal device, would be nice if lemmy had an automated way of doing this (I should look into this more)