When I was using Mastodon, the local timeline was almost exclusively what I was paying attention to. It was a really nice small community of people.

One thing that might not be obvious is that the All feed is different too, as it only shows posts from communities someone on the instance has subscribed to. But since there are ways to search communities across instances, it isn’t really a big deal. Unless you’re on an instance of one or two people maybe.

Federation and moderation are probably where the instance matters most. Also, the matter of who runs the instance is kind of important considering stability and longevity of the instance. (mine for example will probably be gone within a month once I break something)

The package managers are actually a huge upgrade, at least in my opinion. I was always annoyed having to hunt for the right site for the right installer, now I can just search and install with a command without even opening a browser. But the biggest benefit is the updating. One command to update everything is so handy, one command and all my applications and drivers are updated just like that. But there is the issue of many programs simply not supporting Linux. For those you’ll sadly have to find replacements or workarounds.

If you want to get rid of Grub instead of what others have suggested, you could try booting into Windows and look for “advanced startup” and do a startup repair from there. That might destroy Grub and replace it with Windows bootloader again. If it works, your Linux stuff will remain on the drive, but Windows will boot like before. (you can easily reformat the HDD drive from Windows afterwards to use it for storage)

Some of my personal tips for moving to Linux:

1. It’s not Windows. Don’t expect things to work the same way. Trying to force Windows approach often leads to a lot of problems.
2. Watch Youtube videos about Linux. (terminal, package managers, desktop environments, distros, gaming, program replacements, whatever) This will help a ton to get a better grasp on why things work the way they do and what the benefits are.
3. Remember that in Linux you have a lot of options. Distro hopping can be useful early on to see different options/customizations. Then you can pick the things you like later.
4. Avoid graphical appstores. I’ve yet to have a positive experience with them. Terminal is much more reliable and simple.
5. Try out Arch Linux too, if you have the patience. It’s not as difficult as people often make it seem, and installing it yourself is very educational compared to the easier automated installers. AUR for installing programs might also be to your liking more than how Debian based distros do things.
6. Learn how to troubleshoot yourself. Learn to search the web for solutions. If you’re having an issue, it’s likely someone else has had the same issue before.

I’d also suggest Arch assuming one has patience for some tinkering. Getting familiar with the Arch Wiki and the other resources that exist is quite useful even with other distros! Not to mention the better understanding of the system gained simply by following the installation guide.

Even if one doesn’t stick with the distro, the things learned setting it up will be useful down the line as well. The experience would also be very different from Debian based things, so it could be fun for a distro hop!

I think it’s worth mentioning the amount of instances full of bots as well. I just started hosting my own instance and decided to check other instances’ block lists to defederate from at least some bot instances. I now have about 50 blocked instances. (instances with 60k or so users each with no posts)

It was… a project. I’m guessing if one has more experience in hosting it would be easier to figure out. I kept running into error after error, but eventually after spending most of the day on it I did somehow get it working… for now.

After all that I open Lemmy and see a post about easy deploy (linked by squid in response to your comment)… So I decided to give it a try and instance was up in minutes without any errors or issues. That was both very nice and very painful to see!

I tried setting up an instance for my personal use today out of curiosity. So far the most notable personal benefits have been much more responsive site and easier time curating what I seeon my feed. The latter is easy enough since my feed only includes posts from communities people on my instance have subscribed to… which is also quite a downside since I’m the only one on the instance…

Oh and I’m able to federate with whomever I want, compared to if I were on lemmy.world, I couldn’t see posts from beehaw.org and vice versa. I’ll also sleep soundly knowing that the stupid pictures I’ll be uploading (too lazy to upload them on external site) won’t be filling up someone else’s precious servers.