Yeah, my main thought was this is free(minus power costs of course), which is why I went with it.
I looked into different Synology solutions with some kind of host such as your setup, how are you liking Synology as a NAS and does the Optiplex as a host give you any draw backs(NIC/CPU/Memory maxing out, etc)?
I'm not a Mlem user, but are you all worried about how much David contributed, and keeping up with it all? The UI looks the best out of all of the apps I've tested (Android user ;[), and seems to be more feature rich.
If I understand correctly, the issue is /c/sysadmin is different from /m/sysadmin (just example subs), creating overlap communities for the same thing. So if someone's doing an AMA they might be using /c/AMA, but other users would be trying to find it in /m/AMA and not understand why it's missing.
My opinion is, if we want Lemmy to take off and be a replacement for Reddit, it needs to be user friendly for the non-tech savvy users as well without having to explain how it works in a 3 page essay. Consolidating those communities across instances would help with that a lot.
I agree with agreeing to agree here.