to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
So if I wanted to be safe, I should go to every Lemmy instance I can and register my username so that in case one goes down I can still use the login from another instance, right?
I mean, it would be like creating an email address from every domain you can just so you can keep sending emails if one domain goes down.
They'll all be entirely separate accounts.
Makes sense. Especially if I want this username everywhere, right?
Yeah but your username is both halves, it's just inside the instance Lemmy drops the second half fit convince's sake. It would be like if someone asked what your email was and you didn't give the domain.
So it's good that I'm creating users under each instance instead of just using one user from lemmy.ml or beehaw.org?
I mean, do what you want, but I doubt everyone else is going to bother with that. There's no limit on how many instances there can be.