This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
I have the cheapest Hetzner VPS (it’s less than 5€/mo iirc), and I run a few self-hosted services on it. I’ll try to install Lemmy this week just to see, but I don’t doubt it will work without any issue.
I’m probably not going to open it to registrations tho, not really the kind of stuff I want to manage.
Great. I have a shared web hosting server where I host some web content. So I don’t mind moving it over to a vps to also host a lemmy instance. I won’t open it for registration either. But it should help ease the load on the “main” lemmy server.