can we have communities federating as well so that you have a shared feed? Otherwise you risk having multiple small community pockets that can’t hit a critical mass for content.

It’s not that big a deal and we should have the equivalent of multireddits eventually. So, for example, there are half a dozen Casual UK communities on Lemmy but you will eventually be able to create a multicommunity, so you are getting all of them in one feed and it doesn’t really matter which instance a post is on.

!slide@feddit.uk is being ported over and still has multireddits in its interface.

Similarly, I’d imagine instance ownership and ownership philosophy is quite important and choosing the wrong instance for your community could have potentially disastrous consequences?

Not that disastrous and you’ll eventually have the ability to move to another instance, as you can on Mastodon (there are currently tools that let you copy over your account to a new account on another instance).

The big issue is if you are on an instance that has defederated from a lot of others, so you lose access to some communities. This hasn’t happened a lot and is largely done to keep out trolls and bots (some instances are already posting statements explaining who is defederated and why). Tom has said he’ll use defederation sparingly on here, which is a good thing.

One interesting angle I’d not considered, but have heard it from people moving here and elsewhere from lemmy.world, is that that instance is too big. lemmy.world is the size of all the other instances combined and, especially at times of migration, it can be slower. Also their “all” feed is now getting very much like the front page of Reddit and is unmanageable. Here it is easy enough to skim and get up to speed, using the subscriptions to bring in only what you want to see and you get a pretty nicely curated feed, where there you are sticking your head into a firehose of content.