I'm a bit torn. I run this site on a semi-beefy VPS, as far as VPS' go, and I want to invite people to join, but... If I advertise, my poor VPS will die terribly, but there's no local content other than my own drivel.
Discoverability is actually not that good on lemmy, so if there's no one else on your lemmy instance, you have to go to one of the bigger instances to get find groups with the content you want. Then you have to do a search and subscribe on your main instance. Even at that, I've noticed that not all comments come over from federated instances. In essence, there are a lot of manual processes that have to happen in order to get federated content to show.
I also have a Mastodon instance up and running. It's a bit harder on the server, but the discoverability is much, much better. I hooked it up to a few relays and boom! Lots of posts coming through. I've even participated in some hashtag games across instances.
It looks to me, if I wanted the best of both worlds, that I'd need to run a kbin instance. Twitter-like Microblogging (Threads in kbin speak) and communities (Magazines, as they call them) are its main feature set. The problem is, I can't install the thing. It's not for a lack of trying, but the instructions for installation are fragmented and the configuration file isn't documented much at all. Do I need a URL to store media? They refer a LOT to the symfony documentation that doesn't explain the kbin specific configuration options. I don't know. They really need to work on their docs.
Anyway, just my morning musings and frustrations rant. I have an interview to get ready for. Have a great day y'all and I'll see you in the fediverse!
NoRez
Also remember there are "free market" apologists that think a business should be able to charge whatever they want, whenever they want. Charging so much for access that it drives servicew/apps to shutdown is not ok on any level.