I’ve gone and made accounts of a handful of Lemmy instances, all of them larger, more popular ones.
… and I can’t access any of them directly today, likely due to the influx of users from Reddit.
Programming.dev is alive and well though.
I would love for someone to explain how the data itself works between instances because my mind was blown that I can view content from Lemmy.World while it is down if I simply log into another instance, like Yiffit. Is the content itself shared across instances?
I am noticing a lot of comments from lemmy.world communities can’t be seen from my other accounts like lemmy.ca or programming.dev.
Aside from that, I think it’s nice to be on a smaller instance.
I can’t even access the lemmy.world instance. It just always errors out for me.
But I like the idea of smaller servers that specialize in a specific hobby/interest/topic and then all the /c/ communities can be centred around that topic and moderated appropriately. I think it leads to better discussion between people looking for programming topics.
I read earlier that users and posts from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are not being properly loaded and displayed due to the user’s client instance de-federating from instances with problematic users.
In other words, the behaviour of users in some instances has an effect on their reputation.
EDIT: (Maybe not. Not trying to kindle the fire of rivalry between Lemmy instances in here. Yet. * vsauce.wav here *)
I’m a software engineer by trade but I figured the instance call programming.dev would most likely be run by someone who knew what they were doing when it came to running a lemmy instance and would most likely be the most stable. :P
This is my favorite place on the internet.
I think the fediverse will function the best if everyone is split across many instances. As soon as one or several become dominant, the way they do things becomes the norm, for good or bad. That and the server load of course.
I cannot explain the exact details but I remember during the first great Twitter exodus some people discovered a drawback in the ActivityPup protocol that seems to cause performance issues when very influencial users post on a small/under powered instance.
Because communicating all that stuff to many other instances is more costly than spreading it only to people on the same instance. So technically speaking large instances have a performance advantage and must just scale accordingly to the user number.
Everyone agreed that this need to change in oder to ensure a healthy federated ecosystem but I don’t think it was be fixed by now.
