One thing I’m not clear about is the impact my home instance has on me. I joined lemmy.world and am currently using the connect for lemmy app. I know when I sort by Local it will only show me posts from lemmy.world, but beyond that are there any things to keep in mind?
I have read that lemmy.world has been hit by DDoS attacks but I’ve never had any problem using connect for Lemmy during those times as far as I know.
In general it’s not that important but there are a few considerations. There have been instances that just disappeared so that isn’t impossible. There could be instances that yours is defederated from and that would affect what content you get. Also when searching for communities you might not see things you would be interested in because nobody on your instance has searched for it yet. The first successful search for a community requires you to know the actual community address and then that causes it to federate with your home community so if you just search for a word, like cats, you will only see cat communities that someone on your server is already subscribed to or already searched for.
Can you explain that more? What does a community address look like and how would I access one once I know it?
Full disclosure I’m not an expert on this but it would look something like !cats@lemmy.world but I’ll go check a community and get a real address for you.
Edit: that is a real community address so that is what you would need to type into the search the first time, then wait like 5 minutes for it to federate then search for it again and it will come up now.
Edit 2: since you’re on lemmy.world you’re going to have access to a lot of content without doing anything special since it’s a huge instance.