For me running my self-hosted server has been a pain. It took me a while to start getting content, adding relays and so, and still everything feels "dead", with no replies or favorites anywhere.

On top of that it was constantly depleting my machine resources. Yes, it is a small machine but it is a one person server... Today the containers are stopped and the url returns a 503 error and still get dozens of request per second.

I was so sick of it that when joining Lemmy I just created an account in the biggest server I could find.