Each server has its own users and communities (but they still all talk and subscribe to each other!)

Usually I see usernames written in the form @user@lemmy.zip, while communities !InterestingSubject@lemmy.zip

Welcome to the platform!

• You signed up for the lemmy.zip server (=“lemmy instance”), but you can see posts, post comments, and talk to users from any other server. Just like you can send email from your personal email to your work email, it’s still just email! Other than the fact that usernames have a i.e. “@lemmy.zip” part, you shouldn’t really need to think about it 😅 (But when you want to login to your account, you can’t login to another server, you need to login on lemmy.zip)
• No need to learn much more to get started, you just participate in any discussions you want etc 😊
• You can find some communities to subscribe to at https://sub.rehab/ and https://lemmyverse.net/communities . To subscribe to a community, you can search for the community’s full name on your server, lemmy.zip
• Here you can find a mobile app to download: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/ . You can download whichever you want! You can just try them and pick the one you like the most, and you can have a couple of them at the same time and they still access the same content
• Lemmy.zip also has a list in the sidebar, “Useful links”, these four are just alternative websites you can use to access the same thing; again you can just pick whichever you like the most!

Yes, it’s pretty good! I’m a DevOps engineer, and have experience with Ansible, Docker, etc, but I just couldn’t find time to deploy services the best way that I wanted™ for my personal server

So, even though it e.g. doesn’t even use Docker, yunohost really helped me start using the many services I wanted/needed, which otherwise might take e.g. a few hours to a couple of days for each of them to research and configure

So I have one “production” yunohost server, one “testing” yunohost server to test services that I don’t know if I’ll use yet (and I wouldn’t want them to interfere with production e.g. by using too many resources)

and one server without yunohost for mailu, Docker, traefik, etc, which I can use to deploy services the correct way™ as I figure out the services that I really use and find the time to migrate them one-by-one

Even when using yunohost, there are so many things to do after deploying a service (e.g. DNS, configure the server and client software), so it has been really useful to save time when deploying and configuring.

I think it gets you ~80% there, makes self-hosting accessible to everyone, and helps democratize the Internet a bit 💚 It’s more important to have many people setting up e.g. Immich or Nextcloud for their family photos, than only a few Linux people being able to learn how to do it perfectly (Docker/kubernetes high availability, reverse proxies, etc) and have everyone else to need to resort to using centralized services