thanks for the input!

I just haven’t figured out, what happens if users on my small instance would join larger communities in other instances. does the small instance needs to mirror or route the traffic to the other instance, or is this only done through links and on the small instance is really only the stuff local users generated?

I’m currently on !cats@midwestern.social
that was the nearest thing to cat stuff, I’ve found

you can search for communities on Jerboa (in the bottom bar, click the thing, that kinda looks like a hamburger menu)
I’m not sure if any other search is done as well, but it seems to be only communities

in the web frontend you can search for users, comments, communities,…
for lemmy.ml as example it would be this URL: https://lemmy.ml/search

three idea was more, how the single instances can finance themselves. network traffic and storage need to be paid somehow.

I’m not sure how the federated system works exactly and how much a small instance would need to mirror or pipe through, when the users subscribe to large communities on another instance.

so I was wondering, how instances with a small user base can keep up financially - bigger ones can probably live of donations. If a small instance doesn’t need much space or traffic, because subscriptions on remote instances are directly handled on the remote instance, than this is probably no problem.

I’m thinking of setting up my own small server and am not sure what exactly to expect…