I'm not saying we would go down the lemmy.world route, but equally it wouldn't be a home server, there are more reliable options, lemmy.world is struggling a little right now. For moderation I was specifically referring to the tools available to moderate the community, automod on reddit is very powerful and helps take the simpler tasks out of moderation that stop subs becoming spammed and botted messes, the API is very useful for moderation bots and there are some other useful tools, Lemmy isn't close yet and will be a while off..
Edit: Sorry and yes I'm not a fan of discord either, it's not got the knowledge retention like a reddit format where you can go back and pick up on a 2 year old conversation..
Really we don't want to force users off, we want users to want to leave because of how reddit treats it's free labour and content or for reddit to actually work with the subs it's demonizing
This unfortunately is the truth, at the end of the day they will just find new moderators who wont be acting for the users or at least the majority. I'm a mod and although I want this to work and it may still have some impact realistically mods are powerless. Only users talking with their feet can really make a long term difference and there isn't a like for like replacement yet..
Processing power isn't really the issue, but ensuring that whatever we do is stable & reliable (we can't just run it off a server in my office, running a bot there is fine but a sub not so much), open (the de-federation issue) and not difficult to moderate (Not gone in to much detail but apparently it's lacking)
Their instance is hugely overloaded, I think I saw somewhere where people were being encouraged not to register there for now (I mention that as this sub is on .ml). lemmy.world is certainly a more stable server, however users registered on beehaw now can't access it, this is a major issue I see with how Lemmy and de-federation is allowed, but also "homelab" is already registered there although not used, it would likely be my preference though and I have looked at it..
A lot are on discord, but the mods are looking at an official Lemmy alternative. At the moment lemmy.ml is having significant issues so I'm not sure how that's impacting federation, but hopefully they improve their servers soon..
Personally I don't think Lemmy is really a great alternative in its current state especially with servers being able to defederate other servers, meaning that users registered on Beehaw for example can't now view communities hosted on lemmy.world which seems to entirely defeat the purpose to me..
Also as many people come to r/homelab via Google, putting cache: before the https:// in chrome will yield the google cached page, which doesn't go to reddits servers. Also to be clear the mods of r/homelab have no intention of nuking the sub and losing any existing data but appreciate the efforts being made by users and r/datahoarder.
It's a tough unpaid gig at the end of the day, hating on mods is pretty much a meme at this point in time especially on reddit and there's a lot that goes on that 99% of users don't see as it's already been handled by mods or the tools in place. I know of several mods that are planning on leaving reddit entirely, not just because of the current situation (different sub BTW) as they have had enough and it's just not good for their mental health and these are mods of over a decade.