I know that communities don’t translate well to Mastodon, I just find it a little odd how it seems to be a firehose of all comments in a community when viewed in Mastodon. I was expecting it to “repost” posts submitted to the community and have comments in the replies to those posts. Just something odd I was thinking about.
So does that mean that it’s unusable to host an instance on mastodon just for yourself?
Not at all. You can still search and see everything that you federate with, but posts, likes, etc. will not populate on your server automatically unless you follow them. Otherwise, the entire fediverse would have to populate every minute on your personal server. I don’t know how Lemmy handles that.
You also have to subscribe to communities to get their content.
That depends on what you want your experience to be. I run a teeny instance, don’t give a shit about a Twitter-like experience, and am happy getting content only from my direct follows. It’s great!
If you’re expecting a deluge of bullshit from randos, definitely go register at one of the big ones instead!