That’s actually not how it works. Images are hosted by the instance the community is on. Other instances embed those images as links in the page. The image is downloaded from the original instance by the browser.

Yes, it’s a known issue. The devs are absolutely slammed with optimization issues, and this will probably get addressed at some point.

Right now, there is no import/export. It’s a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I’ve been following all the optimization work they’ve been doing on github, I don’t know if they sleep). You’ll have to start over atm, sorry.

Yup, but this is early days yet. As issues get filed on the github and more contributors step in to accomplish stuff, things will improve.

1. Technically yes, but it’s not even vaguely in the same ballpark. If I’ve understood the devs talking about the optimization issues (I could be wrong! Just my limited understanding) the big performance hit is in the local feed. That means being on another instance takes a gigantic amount of the load off, even if you’re still accessing the same community.

2. If lemmy.ml is down, so are all the communities hosted there. All communities not on lemmy.ml would still be up.

All the UI is doing is automatically making it a markdown link. You can do it yourself just by doing [!test_community@sopuli.xyz](https://sopuli.xyz/c/test_community)

More power to ya. I like the ruleset here, but that’s the glorious thing about Lemmy: don’t like the rules of your instance? Go to one that works better for you.

Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you’re the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.

After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.

EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to “All”, not “Communities” when you do this.

Simple: subscribe to both. Ever seen how many /r/trueX subreddits there are (where X is any popular subreddit)? That’s basically what’s going on here.

Users are likely going to see this as it’s the “official” Lemmy instance when trying to join for the first time.

Any admins of instances that are accepting people, give your best elevator pitch!

If you’re the first person to subscribe to a community from your server, what you need to do is go to the community search, switch from “Communities” to “All”, then paste in the full URL (https://lemmy.ml/c/worldbuilding)

I know it’s not great, but keep in mind that Lemmy just increased their userbase by 12-fold overnight and it’s a 2-man dev team. This isn’t some glossy corporate product, and there will be teething issues.

Yup, pack it up boys. Was a good 2 days, but as lemmy.ml has the only functional server on the planet, we’re done here (/s, obviously)

Having understood the fediverse on a theoretical level but not ever actually stepping into it, it’s really amazing to see the interconnectedness of it in real time :)