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.
Would be nice if you could mention more instances than the top 5. The way things look right now, Lemmy is becoming centralized with all communities and users on a handful of servers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that when an instance goes down you lose the content. Instances should be reliable too. So just listing any random instance and overloading them would not help either. Imagine running a private instance for yourself and some friends and getting randomly listed on the signup page here…
I don’t think small instances have a reliability problem. They actually lack users right now. And of course you wouldn’t sign every new person up to the same instance, because that is against the entire point of the technology here.
I seriously believe it would be much better for the Lemmy network to spread people out on the existing instances.
Which is why we will adjust our sign-up page. But not every small instance wants new users because that would increase operating costs which they might not be willing to cover.
No that is caused by instance owners not closing registrations when their instance is full.
It’s a lot of common sense actually in how Lemmy software is built. You can choose to upgrade your instance or you can close registrations if the load becomes too big.
It’s up to the instance owner how to deal with that, given the chance.
I think it’s more a case of long-term reliability than day-to-day reliability. Anyone can create a lemmy instance - including people who may lack the resources or long-term motivation to keep their instance on the internet for basically forever. That’s definitely going to be a much smaller risk with the more established instances - though I’m sure we’ll eventually have a lot of drama over some instance or another in the top 10 shutting down.
Yeah but if they don’t get users, they will shut down guaranteed.
If they get users, they will likely enjoy having an instance more and take care of it.
So it’s a bit like chicken and the egg here. You have to give smaller instances a chance to grow or they will shut down of course.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but I am more risk-averse than you are about it. I think it would be best in the long term to list servers with a proven dedication to the long-term existence and health of the community. This doesn’t necessarily mean the top 5, or even the top X, but it does mean excluding a server hosted on a laptop in someone’s closet with 8 users, or instances from completely unknown in the community admins that have existed for a month.