I noticed that for a week or so now the community has been much smaller tham it used to be. I'm seeing an almost 90% decrease in posts, comments, and votes. Did something get defederated or did a big community go down? Lemmy stats show that Lemmy average user count is still about the same.
I can't recall the exact details, but I've read from some other communities talk of there being some federation slowdowns between lemmy world and other instances, so maybe this is related?
...In fact, this comment in reply to you may serve as an example of the delays, as I responded only a few minutes after yours.
It certainly seems lemmy.world has grown too big for the software and/or their setup to handle. Which is problematic because users there wouldn’t really notice.
You might look at this intro guide from one of Lemmee's admins, or this one from one of Lemmy World's admins. They give decent overviews, and you can set aside the site-specific stuff where relevant, e.g. Lemmee's image size limits.