I just realized that none of the comments or posts I made in the last week from my instance are getting to lemmy.world.
I went to see if I my instance was defederated. No, still showing as connected.
I then went to see if I got blocked or banned. Nope, my username is not showing up in the modlog anywhere.
Is it because my instance is small? I guess not, because I can interact with people and communities from anywhere else just fine.
At the moment, the only plausible explanation I have is that lemmy.world is overwhelmed and dropping messages from smaller instances. They do however everything in their power to keep more users coming up.
Yeah, I get that they were being attacked. I can only imagine that getting DDOS'd is not fun, and worrying about the Schmoes on the smaller instances is not a top concern.
But even in the middle of these constant outages and attacks, the lemmy.world admins are still keeping registrations open? Why? Wouldn't it be better if they encouraged the users to move out of the instance to reduce the load? Isn't the whole point of decentralized technologies to be, you know, decentralized?
I shouldn't have to come here, create an account and make things even more centralized just so that I can tell people that this attitude is hurting the fediverse.
I wouldn't be so pissed at this if it weren't for the fact that some many communities were created here and is making this particular instance a crucial part of the fediverse, but the admins seems to be more worried about getting their user count up than the health of the overall system.
Please, admins, the more you go with this unstable federation and open registrations, the more of an incentive you are creating to centralize this further here. Help the fediverse and help yourselves. Close down registrations and focus on ensuring that everyone can access the communities that are being formed here.
Honestly, I moved away from that instance after days of issues, downtimes and timeouts. Been a smooth experience since then. It's unfortunate that they are more focussed on grabbing as many new users as possible instead of giving the existing users a stable experience.
You have no idea how much work is being put in to get things stable. That's an insult to everyone working in the background together even with other instance admins. Other admins help because they know we all benefit from these growing pains.
A lot of you who come with these remarks seem to forget that the fediverse is still very small. If you want to compare it to reddit the entire fediverse isn't even the size of a medium subreddit.
I actually want to make it super clear that I think the admins of Lemmy.world are amazing in the way they take care of their instance. They are absolutely doing everything they can to make it a good place for everyone.
But at the same time, I feel that having all users on a few large instances is going back to being centralized, and I think they would see this if they took a step back and looked at what's happening now. They clearly wants all users to be on their own or the other already large instances. This is their egos making decisions, not their hearts.
But still I have respect for what they are doing. It's a lot of work and they are under fire all the time. And without all that work, the experience for new users of Lemmy.world would be horrible. So big thank you for that.
Again, the fediverse is still very small. We hope that the fediverse will continue to grow and what is wrong about actively working towards, helping the fediverse as a whole? We work together with other instance admins.. But for some reason it is bad to be successful and we don't have our hearts in this?
Stop comparing it to reddit. Reddit is a for-profit company with 2000 employees and a centralized system that can gives them the benefit of economies and efficiencies of scale.
The Fediverse is a decentralized system. Decentralized systems are not made to be efficient, they are made to be robust and resilient. The different nodes are meant to be doing more work overall, but that is okay because it means that even if one of the nodes is overloaded or faulty, the system as a whole continues to function.
The more you argue that we should even compare lemmy.world (or anyone else in the fediverse) with reddit, the more concerned I get that the mods and admins there don't get the point of decentralization.
A number of client apps, at least on the android side, set the site as a default when asking users to pick an instance. It's not surprising given their status at the moment for the app devs to do that but it does lend itself to some of the centralization problem/risk that's developing. Scaling a site for a reletively new platform at a very rapid pace is going to be a big challenge regardless even if you had a full scale IT team behind it just because of all the unknowns involved. Throw in a pile of new apps all pushing users to that instnace first, and there's no question that most people trying something on a whim won't bother to search out anything beyond that first 'default' option, and it just snowballs. Suffering from success as it where. I suspect if more of the app devs did some of that lifting by pointing new users to pick from a list without a fixed order it would help a lot.