Ah, if that's the case then that does make more sense. I admit I've been looking at this from the perspective of finding a public alternative to reddit, rather than a topical collection of forums.
With potentially millions of other users also looking for such a solution, I'm curious to see whether this movement is embraced.
Absolutely you can, but expecting a completely new user to even figure out what it means to do so is a big ask. Some users can't even figure out how to login using the app.
From the viewpoint of user adoption though, it just doesn't make sense to me to present new users with what is likely to be a very sparse "social network", unless they have registered at one of the top 3 instances (something being discouraged by at least one of these top 3).
It's amazing how something as simple as changing the color of a separator can make a world of difference in how an app feels. All of these changes look great!
I've primarily used Arch for my workstations since around 2007, and sometimes Debian Sid. I recently switched all of my workstations to Fedora Silverblue however, and I've been very happy with this type of workflow; flatpaks for user apps, containers for my dev environments, and automated image-based core OS updates. I am convinced this is the future of Linux computing for most users.
The use of 'comm' and 'comms' as short form for communities makes the most sense to me. Lemmy's url path already uses /c/ as the designation as well.
Like 'sub' and 'subs', they are one syllable, and are easy to say and spell.
What kind of bandwidth and storage requirements might one expect with these user counts? I'm considering self-hosting an instance for migrating a couple of mostly text-based subs I work with (30-40K users).
Accounts are local to each instance. There is nothing stopping you from creating the user account, "dabu" at multiple instances, but there is little point in doing so. They are independent of each other, and currently, there is no concept of karma within the platform.
Your lemmy.world account can be used to post/reply on other instances (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.), and you can subscribe to communities on any other available instance so long as that particular instance is not blocked by your home instance.