First of all, 99% of people don’t have the technical expertise to self host Lemmy, and that’s who we are talking about in this thread.

Secondly, there are very significant benefits to using a well established server versus self hosting. The most obvious perk is having a built-in community to interact with and learn from.

But more importantly, more established servers will already be subscribed to many of the major communities, making the task of finding and browsing remote communities that much easier. Consider this:

Your local version of c/science_memes only has ~200 posts and 1.2k comments. Also, many of the older posts didn’t seem to federate the comments or upvotes. This is because your server only recently subscribed to that community, and federation doesn’t occur retroactively.

The sh.itjust.works version of the community has 3.9k posts and 94k comments, because we have been subscribed since the community started.

The main version actually has 3.92k posts and 99.6k comments. Most of the missing comments on the SJW version are likely from lemmygrad and hexbear users, who are defederated by SJW but not by mander.xyz. This is also another major consideration about self hosting vs. joining a larger server: defederations. Some people will see predetermined defederations as a pro while others will consider it a con (also depending on which servers are defederated). The main thing is that people have options that work for them.

Funnily enough, the communick version is majorly fucked up, not sure why that is.

At this point I’m just getting curious, so I checked the lemmy.myserv.one version as well, and it’s got an impressive 3.84k posts and 98.2k comments.

Might as well try it for c/greentext as well.

• Main community - 1.22k posts / 52.6k comments
• is.hardlywork.ing version - 501 posts / 901 comments
• communick.news version - 1.1k posts / 23k comments
• lemmy.myserv.one - 200 posts / 15 comments (I guess I never subscribed to that community on this account? Kinda weird)
• mander.xyz - 1.22k posts / 52.9k comments (not sure how it has more comments than the main version, someone should look into that)

So yeah, it’s not quite as simple as you make it seem. Hopefully someday Lemmy will integrate the ability to federate communities retroactively as some kind of option. Because I think that was more of a design choice than anything, technically it should be possible to toggle a setting and get your instance to download all of the posts and comments from a remote community, even from before you subscribed.

And I feel like without having access to all of the old posts and comments that we have built up over the past couple years, content on Lemmy probably feels a lot more sparse for a new user. Personally, I have always enjoyed sorting by top posts of all time in various communities, both on reddit and now on Lemmy. Even if you’ve been subscribed to the community the whole time, you tend to miss out on some great posts if you only ever sort by new or hot.

@3dmvr@lemm.ee

And btw, I luckily have a free lifetime subscription to the communick Lemmy server because they did a promotion back in the day.