Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.
pictrs 930M
postgres 1.4G
I run lemmyverse.org.
I'm not sure if it is because of an influx of users, but small instance has stopped receiving posts/comments from any subscribed community on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.world shows up fine as does beehaw.org and others, just not lemmy.ml. I'm not defederated as far as I can tell. Anybody else having this issue?
In that case, you should see pretty much the same content. The only reason I could think they would be different is if you are the first one to subscribe to that community on your instance, then not all the posts will show up. You home instance only starts caching a community when someone subscribes to it and you may have been the first. Other than that, I have seen reports of people saying that the posts aren't the same, but usually it's a few missing here and there. Same with comments.
No, communities on different instances will not have the same content. This is one of the features of the fediverse.
Each instance can have it's own /c/memes and they won't conflict. So, there could be https://lemmy.world/c/memes and https://lemmyverse.org/c/memes and they could each be different with different content and rules. If you want to see each instances 'memes' community, then you will need to subscribe to them individually from your home instance. Once you do that, the 'memes' community will be 'cached' on your home instance and it will show up in everyone's feed on your home server.
Absolutely.
As someone who owns their own instance, it is hard to get your instance recognized. You don't have much content because of the lack of people, and it's hard to get content if you don't have people join. It's a chicken and the egg scenario. Because of this some people choose to re-post content from Reddit to attract people over to their instance. It's great to see the Lemmy community grow, but everyone joining a few huge Lemmy servers kind of defeats the purpose of the fediverse.
I wish my local city's community had more people, but I'm afraid they'll never move over. Oh well, i created it anyway.
I've also created a few others that will get buried.