You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.

You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.

Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won’t bother reiterating.

I just want to say that I hope in the future you’ll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.

Regardless, best of luck with everything :)

I don’t know how big the “wave” is but !buyeuropean@feddit.uk has jumped to the 11th(?) most popular/active community in the last week or so. The activity level reminds me of more niche subreddits, where you’d see a couple posts every hour through the day. Quite an increase over what it was at.

I also recall seeing a chart of a German (?) instance that had linear growth and over the past week it went exponential. I doubt the exponential growth will last more than a couple weeks before going back to linear, but still cool to see.

Edit: Added link to the community.

I agree with everything you said.

I’m thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it’ll hold into the future, but we’ll see.

Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.

I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I’ll guess in the mean time.

I’m assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.

I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I’ll try again :)

Also, I believe the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.

Edit: added correct community and link.

What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.

If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.

You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.

I think that means it evens out and doesn’t count against you. Loophole!

According thr graph, Russia is out of 94% of their prewar stock of artillery systems. I don’t know how many they have been able to produce (I recall hearing around 250/year), buy (recall a few hundred from NK in the last shipment), or repair (???).

Graph source: https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/06/russo-ukrainian-war-day-1106-trump-cuts-intel-sharing-may-prevent-ukraine-from-hitting-russian-territory/