I’ve been on Beehaw and Lemmy.world for the past two weeks now and while people seem to be posting content that isn’t about Reddit or Twitter or how great federated platforms are, such content does not receive as many comments/discussion as topics about the Reddit API controversy, or the current Twitter controversy, etc.
I prefer to sort by “new” when on the main page of either Beehaw or Lemmy.world. Most posts scarcely get a few upvotes and almost no comments. Without comments, I feel far less inclined to leave a comment unless there’s a discussion already going on.
It feels like the gravity of discussion is still mostly centered on complaints and discussion about Reddit (or Big Tech in general), despite this platform being billed as a Reddit replacement. Hopefully that changes with time but there’s a reason I haven’t left Reddit yet.
As a Linux and travel enthusiast I think it’s fun. Maybe a bit ambitious to position my instance as the go-to place for local communities, but I’ll give it a few months and see how it goes.
I recommend paperspace over AWS, Azure or Google Cloud just because it’s easier to setup and the pricing is more straightforward. I just went with the entry level Linux server, it works fine but I can upgrade later. You can install xfce and connect to VNC over SSH if you want, but I find I do 99% of the server work through SSH on PowerShell.
I’ve had one downtime issue so far this week but I honestly think it was due to so many other instance also having downtime and the federation workers stalled. I installed netdata so I can easily monitor CPU and RAM usage, which to no surprise, workers be working. I’m also running scripts to post from RSS feeds until things get going on their own.