This sorted it, thanks very much. I had tried it with both direct and alexandrite so i thought it something more serious than a simple cookie clear so didnt even try that
It's had some issues with image storage which have been the cause of most of the outages, it's also recently been upgraded to 0.19 (from 0.18). More detail is explained here: https://feddit.uk/post/6623316
I thought the person who created it went AWOL and some other folks were going to create an alternative, but now seeing that they're updating the instance I'm wondering if that all got resolved? (not a feddit.uk user but like some of their magazines, so not really up to date but it'd be good to be, if anyone can be arsed to TL;DR what's been going on)
So essentially there was two concurrent plans: one to contact the owner and get additional admins in place to help run the instance; and two to create a new instance and try and migrate things across as best they could. Just recently the owner has popped back up again and now there's additional ppl in place to help run things and no need for a new instance.
Nah it wasnt that, i have a backup account on lemmy.world that i used for posting this, but i couldnt get to any content or even login on feddit - however a post here suggested the upgrade needed a cookie clear and that's resolved it :)