Since you're just starting out, I would recommend evaluating Piefed as your platform as opposed to Lemmy. All Lemmy users can still access your content (and all Piefed users can access Lemmy content), so there is no network size hit.
It's a lot nicer (features, UI/UX) than Lemmy and has a much better development velocity (I've personally had some minor features requests get implemented in under a week).
Not to mention, the developers of Lemmy (and their fanboys) are committed supporters of russian genocidal imperialism. They are bad people. I am not even talking about edge cases. Support for North Korea and claiming that the regime is "a vanguard against imperialism" is horrible.
Some nice things about Piefed:
- Better posting algorithm (e.g. ability to show youtube thumbnails when you post a YT link)
- Multi-community comments - when two different communities post the same URL, you get comments from both
- Better moderation features - Users see a badge for suspected spam-style accounts, moderation/blocking is more granular
- Nice "value adds" - Posting flairs, post tags, built-in scheduled posting
- Link re-direction - Your users don't need to think/understand anything about federation and instances, it all just works out of the box.
@rimu@piefed.social
I think Rimu (head developer of Piefed) can give you a better perspective than I can. He's a good guy!
Cheers!
Note that almost everything here is toggleable off.