I think you’re missing a major con of the current dedicated instance, which is ownership, or lack thereof.

Yes indeed, and there was a major shift in the ownership yesterday. The hosting is now behind a different account, which multiple people will have access to (as soon as DJ gets home from vacation 😎 ). Same goes for our bot account, @wetshavingadmin. The new ownership model gives more people access to the upgrade function.

Around the time when LG started, the Lemmy version wasn’t updated very quickly

Yes, that was frustrating. A lot was learned a lot about how updates work with the hosting company and it will happen a lot faster now. That update is what broke the bot, though, and the bots took time to get updated by the bot writers. The latest update (to v0.18.3) only took a day or so for us to pull the trigger on, so we could make sure it wasn’t a bad update.

With the way everything is set up right now (as of yesterday), if another Lather Games were to start tomorrow, we would not have the same problems.

Until someone is willing to dedicate the time to fully support this instance

I have access to everything (hosting, admin, accounts, etc) as of yesterday, and I’ve been busy making changes and improvements. The bot should be all set up and good to go. We also have djundjila and I’m sure the moderation team will grow.

I kind of feel the ship has sailed and people are happy to continue using Reddit

Reddit and Discord are pretty cool! I’m pretty excited for the future of Lemmy, but it’s going to be a slow churn. Nothing wrong with that.