I also have my own instance. But it feels so lonely being the only one on a sever haha. That being said, do you know if upvotes and downvotes are also federated? In fact, I’m using jerboa on beehaw and I don’t think I see any upvote / downvote metrics

Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?

The instances all store separate versions of the same data. However, federation only starts, when your instance gets a reference to the community. So say you are on a different instance. Initially, you won’t see your favourite communities, so you’ll have to start searching for them and linking them up in your instance. Once that happens, your instance will start receiving the posts, with the caveat, that old posts and comments will not be visible.