Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.

pictrs   930M
postgres 1.4G

I run lemmyverse.org.

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.

Space cows

Absolutely.

I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don't ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.

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.

Not as many as you would think. I work in a technical field and most people had no idea there was a protest going on. They also didn’t even know of alternative mobile apps. Most didn’t care and just used the official app. There may be a slight bump, but nothing significant.

Like others have said, nothing is stopping them. That is why it is important to spread communities around to other reputable instances, so if something like that does happen, only the communities on that particular instance are lost.

There could be a few reasons.

• They want to copy over their favorite content.
• They want to try to attract more people to a community by bootstrapping content.
• They are trying to artificially inflate their instance for nefarious reasons.

Personally, I think adding some of your favorite Reddit posts is fine as long as you don't blindly copy over everything from a subreddit. I have a couple communities that I brought over that I like, but without content, they mean nothing.

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.