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
    2•1 year ago

    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.

    …Yes, it’s still a problem 👀 I can’t believe that needs to be said - stability is nice but reliability is also very important. It’s not good to have entire instances be effectively shadowbanned because of software issues.

    While it was through no fault of your own, I’d also like to point out it was through no fault of lemmy.world, since the issue was that your instance was failing to federate to lemmy.world, and not the other way around. Neither the problem nor the fix was ever on lemmy.world’s side.

    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”.

    We’ll keep disagreeing here as well - because it’s not accurate to say lemmy.world is full, nor is it accurate to say lemmy.world is positioning itself as somehow superior to or easier to start with than other instances. Its signup page literally has no text at all other than naming the information fields. Every single page on lemmy.world also has a direct link to join-lemmy.org in the lower right, where lemmy.world isn’t even listed as a recommended instance - just a popular one, in a randomized order list. Even the “Get started” guide in the lemmy.world sidebar takes a completely neutral tone about this instance, explains federation, and links to a site that lists other instances. The success of lemmy.world has nothing to do with bias or unfair practices. I’d wager it’s 90% word-of-mouth.

    • @youarehurtingthefediverseOPEnglish
      -1•1 year ago

      stability is nice but reliability is also very important.

      Reliability of the system overall? Yes. But reliability in distributed systems is achieved by ensuring that we don’t have single points of failure and by making it “cheap” to fail. Having a gigantic instance in a sea of powerless nodes is quite the opposite of “reliable”.

      since the issue was that your instance was failing to federate to lemmy.world.

      The issue still persists. I updated the database 3 hours ago, my posts are still not visible here. @Antik claims it might be that my server got into their own “ban list”, which would squarely would make it their fault because (a) other nodes are not doing this and (b) I didn’t make any change on my server infra.

      because it’s not accurate to say lemmy.world is full

      Yes, it is. It’s not up to them to say it. It’s up to us in the minority side to go on and say “hey, you are taking up too much space”. Which they are.

      The success of lemmy.world has nothing to do with bias or unfair practices.

      That’s a cop-out. They literally launched their instance on a blog post saying “you already know us from mastodon.world and we want to make lemmy.world equally popular.”

      I’d wager it’s 90% word-of-mouth.

      If that is true and if they wanted to be responsible with the fediverse, they could (should?) be actively suppressing it, much like lemmy.ml admins did during the reddit blackout.

      –

      I think I get it, in the end of the day you can argue “you can not blame them for their own success”, and normally I’d agree. I am just seriously asking you (and the admins) to reconsider this idea of what “success” is (especially in the context of the fediverse) and I would really like if they could stop for a moment and see of they could to get themselves out of the spotlight in the moment where their “success” is leading to undesired side-effects on others.