Welcome to Lemmy NZ
We don’t have many members, so until that changes, feel free to subscribe to communities on other instances.
At the top of the screen click Communities, then rather than Subscribed or Local, instead choose All.
This will show all the communities (like subreddits) that are currently federated (connected) with this instance (site).
You can comment on posts in these communities and interact with them the same as users on that instance, and others can subscribe to and post in our communities too.
On the home page, try the “All” tab to see all posts from all instances we federate with.
If you want more information on Lemmy and how it works, see How does this all work, anyway?
You might need to consider putting limitations on sign-ups temporarily if it becomes a problem.
Haven’t managed anything on the fediverse myself, but have heard that (as you mention) federating content is what causes the delays… even if you have a small server, you still have to sync a lot from the big highly active servers, which can eat up a lot of CPU
Yeah, most of the instances require approval for signups. I started like that, but reading threads about barriers to Lemmy/Fediverse uptake, I tended to agree it’s a step that the general public aren’t used to, and it’s an unnecessary barrier most of the time.
I know (from the Beehaw matrix chat) that they have started rejecting users as they are growing too fast and have an image in mind of what they want their community to be like. Probably if we get lots of new users joining all of a sudden then I’ll need to turn on sign-up approvals for a while. That lets us add people at a level we can handle.
From what I’ve heard, the database CPU usage is the biggest bottleneck for larger instances. I’m actually seeing higher CPU usage now, even though the site says 0 users online. Still less than 50% CPU usage though.
Edit: If I view from the homepage it says 7 users online. Perhaps this is why there’s higher CPU usage.
Edit from 3 days later: we’ve had 30 users online and CPU under 20% so maybe it was higher because of a background job or a bunch of logged out users.