This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
I'm curious about people starting up: Are you storing images on your own site with this instance?
Yes, but I’m a single user instance currently so it wasn’t a concern for me. I also have like 20GB of storage so I have some time even if others join me.
How are you monitoring for illicit images? How does any instance do that? And because of federation, is there no way to ever delete those images?
This becomes more of a problem as the community gets bigger. I have no automated way to monitor for that stuff now.
Federation doesn’t affect my ability to delete an image uploaded to my server. When something federates out to another server, I don’t think a copy of the image is saved - it’s more like a pointer - “hey this post + image are saved on this server”