Maybe I'm misinterpreting your post but what's the point of having an instance if your only users are the mods you appoint? You'd just be creating your own personal echo chamber. The whole point of a site like this, at least as I see it, is to bring in a wide variety of users with different opinions. That's a big reason why Reddit was so successful in the early days. I know that everyone is anti-Threads and Meta, but clearly @ruud@[email protected] knows something we don't. I think being federated with Threads could be a good chance to grow this community and bring more attention to the Fediverse as a whole. If you see something from a Threads instance that you really don't like, you can always block and/or mute the account. On Mastodon, you can block entire instances from showing up in your feed. I'm not sure if that is a thing with Lemmy or not, but if not, it might not be a bad thing to implement later on. Sorry for the wall of text.

Use the ansible Lemmy install, it's very simple and will also create https certs and everything. But you need a domain first, pointed at your hosted server ip address.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible

So basically:

• Buy domain
• Rent a server somewhere (hetzner is great and cheap).
• Point domain at server ip.
• Use the ansible install against your server to install everything.

That's pretty much it. The ansible install takes care of everything.

Then you need to subscribe to some other instance community from your instance so other instances know you exist, for federation to work.

There are multiple.