Like does content get mirrored to my instance and then mine distributes it ala BitTorrent or is my instance it’s own thing?
Text gets mirrored but not images. In general it helps, but not by much unless you host for several hundred users.
Link thumbnails do get mirrored. My understanding is the front end of Lemmy is pretty heavy for the big instances and the burden of federating to another instance is pretty small. One thing I’ve noticed on my instance is that sometimes inbound federation can be pretty annoyingly slow.
Not only annoyingly slow, but I tend to get a massive influx of posts from one community all at once. It fills my entire page with that single community. It’s been my biggest annoyance so far.
This is fixed in 0.18.x
I’m running 0.18.1-rc.4 and it’s fixed lots of issues
