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.

  • zkfcfbzrEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    Yes, of course, and this is what needs to change!

    I disagree that just having large instances, in and of itself, is a problem.

    the second part

    Slowing growth is still a gigantic downside when growth is one of the most important needs for the platform.

    For your scenario: You could argue that this is actually a good thing from your perspective. You realized there was a problem because lemmy.world is so big. If most instances were of equal size you likely wouldn’t have noticed there was a problem at all. I’m willing to bet there are other instances you have the same problem with and just haven’t noticed because of how much smaller they are - but lemmy.world’s size helps bring problems like this to light, so they can be fixed.

    the third part

    That would be spreading the power, rather than spreading the load, on a semantic note.

    I don’t disagree with this section in principle - but I do still disagree that the solution is to close registrations. The admins have already stated they have plans to inform new users about other instances during the registration process, and soon. That’s a good faith effort and a good middle ground.

    the last part

    You having to create an account here isn’t because lemmy.world is too large - it’s because of software issues. You mentioned elsewhere that you made a post from your own instance about the problem (I assume in this community, otherwise why would you expect that to work?) - but if your problem was that content from your instance wasn’t showing up in lemmy.world, I’m not really sure why you expected that to work. It’s not disturbing that you had to create an account here, because you would have had to do so even in the hypothetical scenario where there are, say, 20 main instances with about 4.5% of the active userbase each.

    • @youarehurtingthefediverse@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      If most instances were of equal size you likely wouldn’t have noticed there was a problem at all.

      If I haven’t noticed the problem, is it really a problem?

      I can live in a world where I’m out of reach from maybe 20% of the potential audience, and maybe I wouldn’t mind it if I noticed that a workaround was required for that. But I do very much mind having to live in a world where I have to be checking with the admins what the hell is going on and why I am shut off from communication with the majority through no fault of my own.

      That’s a good faith effort and a good middle ground.

      Sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree on this one. Saying “we are the largest and easiest place to get started, but if you don’t believe us here are some other places you can take a look” is completely different from “our home is full now, but the cool thing about the fediverse is that you can enjoy it wherever you are”.

      Having the inability of saying “we can’t do it, but you can be happy on X, Y and Z” feels like a twisted way of saying “we don’t really care about you, we care about having you”.

      Anyway, thank you for at least trying to engage in a productive conversation. Everyone else seems to just want to feel personally attacked and completely missing the point.