First I want to say that I love the idea of Lemmy. I think it’s very reminiscent of the old days of BBS’s and networked message boards (FIDOnet).
With that in mind I’d like to suggest that maybe some thought should go into guiding people to the right instances to sign up on.
I think more instances should try to specialize in certain content and host communities that cater to that. Much like the BBS’s of the olden days you could have an instance that is all about sports, or an instance specializing in comic book communities, or an instance that caters to a certain region or state.
With that in mind, it would be great to have a page that indexes instances by interest groups so people could make better decisions about which instance to join rather than just everyone trying to pile up on lemmy.ml.
Thoughts?
Yeah, that’s true - .ml seems to be struggling just now. I’m not technically knowledgeable to know what the solution might be, but I did see a suggestion that the hardware they are using isn’t really sufficient for the influx they’re seeing.
As for the wider issue, it’s definitely something that needs discussion and thought. I’m fairly hopeful that time will see things settle into some sort of working system. It’s quite exciting to see it all a bit chaotic, but also it does cause frustration!
EDIT - by the way, I hope I didn’t come across as being snarky about there already being a discussion, just wanted to let you know about it :-)
No worries! I just wanted to let you know why I wasn’t replying where a similar discussion was already in progress.
It’s weird that since I was already subbed to [email protected] on my home instance I am able to post and read replies to this post. But I am unable to post or reply to any communities on lemmy.ml I am not already subbed to. For example, on the asklemmy sub, it is marked as “subscribe pending” and I can see the original post you linked to but I can’t see any of the comments. If I go to asklemmy@lemmy ml I can see the original post and ALL the replies but since I’m not a member of the lemmy.ml instance I am unable to reply to it there.
There’s definitely some federation weirdness and lag going on with anything originating from lemmy.ml, hopefully they can get it straightened out.
I actually think that it was a bad idea to host general interest communities that are not lemmy dev related on lemmy.ml. I work in IT and unfortunately the bulk of the active IT communities are all on lemmy.ml, so I am effectively locked out of them until lemmy.ml stops being hugged to death.
Ugh! What a pain. Hope it gets sorted soon. Things are pretty smooth on Lemmy.world so far, thankfully - unless trying to access stuff on Lemmy.ml! ;-)