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've just had a look at the graphs that show federation activity. There is a technical problem that is causing sopuli.xyz, your instance, to receive data from lemmy.world slower than it needs to. Lemmy.world is where most comments and posts come from. This has been going on for over a week and gets worse every day.
Edit: it seems i can't link it to meta since your post did not federate to dbzer0.com; it would be helpful if you put the links in your post for help with troubleshooting
happened 2 times on dbzer0.com too, with 2 different issues, one on lemmy.worlds side, the other on dbzer0;
i'll link both of them in your post in meta for reference
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.
I don't know if it's directly linked, but small instances are not getting easy entry to the lemmy fediverse. Let me explain succinctly.
I have a somewhat beefy PC with RAM and storage space, it only serves lemmy.mindoki.com over a 1Gb down, 700Mb up link.
When I surf the lemmyverse it should be quick as a nimble, right? Not sloggish like pouring molten asphalt, if any asphalt there is...
Trouble is that I'm the sole user, so if I don't run around everywhere things work quite badly if at all. Unread messages (you have 4 new messages!) takes 30 seconds to get for example or more. Since a 5-6 days internet cutoff (double unluck hardware side from my ISP) all servers my server exchanged with just laid me off and it feels like I'm blocked since then. I go to say artshare through my server, I get the posts but they all have only the base 1 up vote, few comments.
I'd love helping out more, but if you have to have hundreds of users for your server to just function, well, it just doesn't make sense to have a small server.