I chose a small instance from the start and haven't gotten that much lag at all. The one thing that does annoy me is the refreshing on the mainpage (and then suddenly an entire communities' posts are all on top), but pressing refresh fixes that for me. Confusing? At first, but I don't consider myself knowledgeable about tech and I was able to get it up, running and personalised before even reading a single guide. I curently sort by "all" and "new", and just keep adding to my subscriptions.

Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. But I wouldn't call lemmy unusable at all. I actually spend a lot more time on here than at the aforementioned place. And one absolutely major bonus point: we can integrate images in our reply here. And I can copy/paste in the reply without it suddenly completely bugging out and not being able to type at all. It just works as its' supposed to.