for personal use, main reasons are you won’t have to worry about instance admins making arbitrary decisions that you don’t agree with, and no worries about server overload or downtime.

for making an instance for public, helping fediverse become a more viable alternative by spreading the load over more instances and helping it grow.

Top of all time post on lemmy is now about beans.

this is the post: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/559757

Sounds straight from a black mirror episode.

Oops my bad, I’ll update the post

comments and upvotes work similarly in the fact that only users from federated instances will show up.

But also yes there is a short delay before comments sync in general too aside from the above fact.

For upvotes it only shows upvotes from the instances your home instance is federated with, so for a smaller instance there’s a chance it has not the same big federation list as some more popular instances and thus show smaller upvote count.

Right now the best way is to search from inside a lemmy instance itself. lemmy search finds much better results than what native reddit search used to give.