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.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    So I’m going to push back against your response here pretty hard.

    First, I’m not talking about myself, I’m trying to understand general user behaviour … so going ad hominem here or presuming I’m projecting my own problems isn’t productive or useful.

    Second … “it isn’t that hard” is, IMO, the mantra of someone choosing not to understand the users, which can become a pretty toxic behaviour or perspective.

    You state …

    picking your first instance is not as important as you make it out to be here

    (emphasis mine)

    The pertinent questions here are:

    • How is a new user supposed to know that?
    • Where has such information been provided?
    • How clearly and easily discoverable is that information?
    • How convincing and comprehensible is that information for a newcomer?
    • How much does digesting this information ultimately contribute to the load of signing up for lemmy such that it ultimately doesn’t alter the fact that picking an instance, or learning that it doesn’t matter which instance you pick, is friction that is easy to bypass by simply picking the big central instance?

    If you were trying to help me … thanks … but I wasn’t talking about me … rather the generic “new user”.

    And none of what you say about it being not as important doesn’t really alter the reality that the friction of decentralisation makes (re-)centralisation around a big instance the path of least resistance and therefore the common choice for many newcomers.