The more normal transfer path is to offer to take over a specific community or communities by:

1. Reaching out to the existing mod and asking to be added to the mod team.
2. Documenting their lack of response after a few days or a week.
3. Documenting the failure to abide by Lemmy world moderation guidelines: https://lemmy.world/post/424735 by linking spam or off-topic posts and to communities that lack rules/useful-sidebar-content, etc.
4. Posting this info in [email protected] and offering to takeover moderation.

This is better than mass deletion because it keeps whatever small list of existing subscribers and post content intact across the transition. For moderation, Lemmy world admins will get notified of reports and can address anything that violates instance rules.

Two tips:

I have not tried running WINE yet but I plan on doing so soon.

Steam "just works" on Linux, you can install it via flatpak (which I use) or from their deb repo. It includes "Proton", which is a fancy bundle of wine and some extra open source valve sauce to make it nice and easy to use. Any game that runs on the steam deck also runs on Linux via proton, and there's no messing around at all. It looks and feels just like steam on Windows, and thousands of games just work with no setup or config beyond clicking the big blue and green buttons to install and run. Not EVERY games works, but tons do. I'd heavily recommend this over raw wine to a beginner.

The second tip is not to ask what you can do on Linux. The answer, to a first approximation, is that you can do everything on Linux that you can do on Windows or OSX. I daily drive all three, and mostly do the same stuff on them. Instead, ask YOURSELF what you WANT to do on Linux. Then Google and ask us HOW to do it... or what the nearest approximation is if the precise thing you want to do doesn't work on Linux.

This, but desktop linux users are on the step for 193rd place while excitedly screaming and holding a third-place sign. Steamdeck users are on the 3rd-place step while calmly playing their deck.

This looks weird to me.

• Kbin downvotes are public, you can see who made them at https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]. Kbin doesn't federate downvotes from Lemmy though, so you can only see downvotes made there. I stalked your profile a bit on kbin and there was nothing weird. Mostly no downvotes, and in the few cases there were some there was no correlation of people across threads. The worst I saw was like three people downvoting a series of comments in a single thread, which is not weird or stalky.
• Downvotes are also not anonymous to Lemmy instance admins. They are recorded in Lemmy's DB with a link to who made them. This isn't exposed via the web-ui or app-api, so regular users cannot see them... but admins (and users with their own Lemmy instance) can.

I would consider reporting this to [email protected]. If someone is actually sockpuppeting 10-20 accounts and profile stalking, that sounds to me like bannable abuse and something the admins might be interested in looking into. Now, of course, if you're the one who has been harassing people in old comments, moderated comments, deleted comments, or DMs... admins might decide to ban you all. Two wrongs don't make a right, and often result in two bans. It's also possible that admins have bigger fish to fry and won't have time to investigate... but if I were admin I'd be interested in early instances of mass-sockpuppeting so I could think about ways to detect and react to it.

Edit: As an aside, the animated profile icon is pretty annoying and it may be that people downvote just for that.

I blame unfederated subscriber counts. If you look up any community from an account on lemmy.world and there is a local version and a remote version... the local version LOOKS bigger when it's about half the size because the remote version only shows subscribers from lemmy.world whereas the local version shows subs fediverse-wide.

If sub counts were apples to apples for remote and local communities, people would much more frequently sub to the bigger remote comminity. But lemmy.world is so big, that when people are subbing locally because they're confused about which is bigger... the lemmy.world community actually becomes bigger very quickly. So it's winning the community scaling races consistently on pure confusion. The resulting community centralization is not all that healthy and they often overtake better run and more established communities for no meaningful reason.

Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it's basically donations... either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.

But to put into context how much money we're talking about...

• A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you're talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
• The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That's not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn't take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.

Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course... those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.

They're different communities, just like /r/tech and /r/technology, /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, or the million different aita subs that popped up last month.

There is a GitHub issue for the Lemmy equivalent of a multireddit which would allow you to create a compound feed of several communities. Others have gone further and requested some kind of automatic merging, which strikes me as a pretty terrible idea... they're different communities with different rules and different mods and maybe different cultures. Sometimes they exist separately because the mods don't like each other or have very different ideas about what the culture should be. Transparent merging in such cases is awkward and creates confusion.

My advice is to consider the server name as if it were part of the sub/community name so that [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) is just a different thing from [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). Dupe subs have always been a thing on Reddit, they're a thing here too. They will get better with time as community discovery improves and people aggregate in the active/well-moderated ones and the abandoned ones die off.

Have you considered modifying this to be a pull-request for lemmy-ui? It's cool to have an extension, but Lemmy being open-source makes it possible to merge the improvement upstream and make it better for everyone.

I believe hot measures the most upvoted recent posts, and active measures the most commented. There were some massively upvoted and commented posts in the last day or two. Probably nothing is coming close to displacing them, and whatever the definition of "recent" is hasn't kicked in enough to push them down the rankings.

Switch to new or top day to see something more dynamic.

I see very little discussion about the implications of this for moderation, and it feels to me like they get very sticky. With traditional human-curated multi-reddits, you as a subscriber must engage with the idea that you are choosing to aggregate multiple communities into a single feed, which is intuitive enough, the subscribed feed already works that way.

But by making it automatic, the software hides the fact that it's pulling together discrete feeds from communities with different rules and different moderators. This feels very awkward to me. I'm all in favor of traditional multi-reddits, which can be used to create this sort of feed for yourself. I'm still on the train of "duplicate communities will sort themselves out if community discovery is made much easier and popular communities reliably show up at the top community searches, mostly irrespective of what instance the search was performed on" (obviously defederation takes precedence here).

Lemmy doesn't have a concept of what a "post like this" is. It only categorizes posts based on simple statistics like "number of recent votes", which I believe drive the "hot" ranking or number of recent comments (active), or the date of the post.

Creating a concept of a "post like this" would generally require an AI/ML classification pipeline. This kind of thing is common at big social media companies, but it's pretty computationally expensive compared to regular browsing. It's also somewhat ideologically fraught as it's the same tech big social media companies use to create algorithmic echo chambers and drive unhealthy engagement. I realize your proposed use-case is pretty innocuous... but I suspect many folks will extrapolate to view the proposal through that lens.

I don't see folks champing at the bit to immediately add a feature that would add to the capacity woes the biggest instances are already feeling, but I'm equally sure you're not alone in desiring features that would need to be built on top of classification pipelines. Maybe someday Lemmy will have one, but it doesn't exist today.

Edit: Maybe a less general approach to this would be to offer a weighting for each community, and lemmy would skip some percentage of posts to that sub in your feed. This isn't how most commercial sites would do this, but it's simple and maybe close to what you want. It also doesn't exist today though.

What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?

• You register your account on sh.itjust.works, that's where all the info you care about resides. Your list of subscribed communities resides there. When you read a post, it gets fetched out of the db on sh.itjust.works (irrespective of where the home instance for that post's community is... when you read it it comes out of the database on your home instance), and when you comment on a post, that gets written to the db on your home instance. Your home instance a standalone fully functioning thing.
• When you subscribe to a remote community like this one, you tell your home instance "keep up to date with posts and comments for this community and let me know about them. Your home instance asynchronously gets all those updates while you're asleep or whatever so it can show them to you out of its local database when you come back. If more users on sh.itjust.works subscribe to the same community... there's no incremental overhead. All ya'lls instance is ALREADY subscribed to that sub. So other users on your instance can sub to it for free, it's already in the instance's database.

Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail?

• If lemmy.ml (where this community is homed) falls over from being overloaded or just is broken for whatever reason, your instance is unaffected. You can still read posts and make comments. This community however... is affected. New posts and comments for this community might come through intermitently or not at all for you (and everyone in the lemmyverse) because the community's home server isn't working well enough to reliably deliver them over federated replication. You can still read older posts and comments that have already been synced to your home instance, but new ones might not arrive. You might also see weird stuff like being able to see new comments from other sh.itjust.works users on this community, since those get written to your db before getting federated back to the community's home server. But mostly updates from other instances stop or get unreliable.
• If sh.itjust.works falls over for some reason... well... that sucks for you. You can't log in or browse anything on it. You can still visit this sub at https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy/ as long as lemmy.ml is working and you'll be able to see the posts and comments that other accounts make. But you'll be an anonymous read-only browser, you won't be able to post or comment until sh.itjust.works comes back online (or you make a new account elsewhere and lose all your comment history and subscription list).

Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?

There's a github issue for this, but it's not done yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506.

I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs?

I don't think that's a good assumption. lemmy.ml is hosted on OVH, a cloud provider. My home instance on lemmy.world is hosted by admins that run something like a 32 CPU mastodon instance. Most instances with over 100 users are running on some kind of probably modest but "real" cloud instance. The admins are volunteers, but often smart technical folks paying for small but real compute infrastructure.

The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.

Anticipating growing pains isn't wrong, it's probably gonna happen. But the devs are gonna find and work on the biggest performance problems so that people can viably run bigger instances, and instance admins are gonna run bigger hardware and ask for donations or run patreons to cover the cost. In my opinion, the bigger worry is that Lemmy will fizzle... not that it will spectacularly explode. As long as people join and contribute and are interested, we'll find a way to improve scalability and performance. The death knell would be if people get bored and leave, but compute capacity won't be the problem in that scenario.