On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).

You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).

In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.

Support for groups (i.e. communities on Lemmy) is coming to Mastodon sometime soon.

You should be aware that the people over at Raddle have a massive grudge against Lemmy and they post shit like this all the time.

It is true. You can host an image somewhere (i.e. actually run the web server) paste a link to it, and if anybody clicks on it they will show up in your web server’s access log. Typically this will include an IP address and a user agent string (indicating OS, browser version, etc.). To mitigate this, Lemmy would need store copies of any media which gets linked here and serve those instead of allowing hot-links. Mastodon does this, but for the same reason it requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a small instance.

I feel like PeerTube hasn’t broken through yet in the way Mastodon has, and Lemmy is kind-of broaching on. Mastodon itself is heavy for what it does. I need 8GB of RAM, >600GB of storage, and 2 CPU cores to run a 100 person instance. Lemmy is leaner (as well as some microblog style alternatives to Mastodon like Misskey / Pleroma). Peertube, on the other hand, can only get so lean. Hosting video content is orders of magnitude more intensive than hosting a text-based message board. It is much more costly to do this, and to compete with platforms like YouTube, it is not sufficient for just spin up a single instance. You also need to work out CDNs, caching, load balancing, etc.

Like Jack said, I’d just find an instance you vibe with and post stuff there, but it will take a lot of resources to grow the network as a whole.

AFAIK the problem with resin printing is vapors, not particles. A respirator may help, but it is no substitute for proper ventilation.

Step one: Post

Post cool / funny / poignant shit which isn’t just pictures of your lunch. Lunchposters are the bottom of the barrel. At least post pictures of your cat. Same goes for Free Software. Free Software is great, but when you’re joining a Free Software social network, you don’t want to be the millionth guy posting about ArchLinux or Emacs every day. This is the quickest path of turning free social networks into ham radio (which is also great), where a bunch of boomers get on the radio and talk to each other about their radios.

Step two: Network

Find cool people. This is more difficult without an AlGoRiThM, but try out different hashtags (which you can also follow), dive into the local/federated feeds and try to find one or two people to follow at a time.

Step three: Engage

If you have a good bit or meme (or insight, even) that’s relevant, engage. Don’t be a reply-guy though. Don’t fall into the trap of just showing up in the mentions of the same 5 people every day. Never stop posting your own shit, even if it gets little engagement initially. No one will follow you when they are guaranteed to see your dogshit posts below the person they actually care about anyway. Follow back the people who follow you. When one of your posts really takes off and gets a lot of likes, look for the people who scrolled your profile and liked the shit you actually care about instead of whatever random meme that you got trending. Those people are your most powerful allies.

You get likes (and discovery) from making insightful replies, but you will only get follows if you are posting interesting stuff of your own.