Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.
If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it’s really you. Would be cool. 😎
Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn’t dependent on one instance.
Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.
It’s just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It’s going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.
Also…there’s a non-zero chance it’s getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.
I read that it was a DDOS but I wonder what the motivation for doing that is? It isn’t like you can extort any money out of lemmy.
