That's an open issue on Github. The devs are currently in the middle of trying to optimize performance so the whole network doesn't go down on the 12th. If you know any webdevs willing to have at it, great!
You should be able to federate with all available communities by default.
The trick is that your instance will not pull in all communities by default. Once 1 person subscribes to a community (a bit tricky for the first time, see here), all users on your instance will start seeing that community in their "All" feeds.
Can definitely be done. Just need someone to do it. I need to read more of the documentation and figure out how all this works before contributing, I don't want to waste the dev's time coaching a newbie. That's the last thing they need right now.
Definitely yes on lemmy in general, definitely no to lemmy.ml. Pick a server you like the rules & admin for, maybe ask the admin directly, and direct everyone to that server. That way you can also host the PF2E community on that server.
Things are already getting way too centralized on lemmy.ml, we need to spread out a bit
True, but I agree with lemillionsock's core point. Nothing short of Reddit pulling the plug on the servers will cause 430 million monthly active users to shift in any short time-frame. However, what is likely to happen is a sharp decline in quality as the core content contributors move on, then a slow gradual decline as the remaining users go "Where'd all the content go?".
Right now, there is no import/export. It's a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I've been following all the optimization work they've been doing on github, I don't know if they sleep). You'll have to start over atm, sorry.
Hi all, wandering around random small Lemmy servers seeing if I can be of use. To pull communities into your instance, you need to first have someone subscribe. Useful picture in this comment, but basically you go to "Communities" at the top, and start a search with the full URL of the community you want (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy, for example) and change "Communities" to "All" in the search options.
Once you've clicked through to the community and subscribed, it'll be pulled in forever. If you want to dig around for communities to subscribe to, go to the community finder.
Technically yes, but it's not even vaguely in the same ballpark. If I've understood the devs talking about the optimization issues (I could be wrong! Just my limited understanding) the big performance hit is in the local feed. That means being on another instance takes a gigantic amount of the load off, even if you're still accessing the same community.
If lemmy.ml is down, so are all the communities hosted there. All communities not on lemmy.ml would still be up.