Hello!
I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series.
Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise skipper!
As a hobby, I have an N-Scale (1:160) model train layout.
The short answer: yes.
The long answer: Yes, but…
If this is your home network, you’re providing attackers with an entry point into your network. You’re also giving yourself an avenue to get DDOS’d etc. You’d have to open ports and get that set up - or deal with a reverse proxy or whatever.
But generally it’s as easy as running a Docker container and pointing a domain at your IP.
They’re supposed to have the same content, but may have different moderation.
A great example - /r/gaming vs. /r/games on Reddit (or /r/truegaming). All basically the same thing, but they have different moderation styles.
This is an issue on Mastodon as well, and the way it was solved there was by adding a browser extension which did the rewriting.
It was something about the fact that those are completely different websites that can’t talk to each other, I think.
Basically the main difference is who your admin team is. So that means different moderation styles, allowing NSFW or not, allowing downvotes, controlling which communities get made (or not), etc.
You can create communities on your home instance if your admins allow it (Lemmy.ml and Kbin do, Beehaw does not). But you have to make an account on an instance to create a community there.
It’s totally reasonable to jump between instances until you find one you like.