Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
I’m of the opinion that it’s ok and natural for a few larger servers to emerge. The reason why I think it’s natural is because normal people frankly don’t care about the nuanced benefits about finding an instance that caters to their exact moderation preferences or philosophical pontifications about why Big Tech is bad. They just want to click on funny images, upvote them, and maybe comment once in a while.
I think that’s ok since I believe the ultimate goal of social media sites is to serve content for users’ consumption in a non-abusive way. The reason why I believe the fediverse is probably better than traditional social media is because it gives the power of choice. That power doesn’t need to be executed, but because it’s baked into the platform the users always have the ability to exercise it. If a large instance decides to screw over its users, then the users can simply move to another instance and still have full access to the network’s content. That power alone is what makes me ok with having few large instances.
I think the differing view here is ‘natural growth’ vs ‘forced growth’.
I don’t think large servers that come by being large because they’re the preferred choice for a given community, topic, reliability, or whatever other criteria become valuable are bad.
I think setting it up so that a new user is told ‘You go here, and you sign up on this instance.’ and writing all the onboarding stuff to direct them to the mega-instance for the sake of convenience because we can’t figure out how to make it simpler or more clear or explain how federation works isn’t the right path.
I will admit I do not have a fantastic answer on how to explain to someone who has limited technical knowledge exactly WHY federation is the way to go for communication and that the instance you should pick relies almost exclusively on the reliability of the service (is it fast? does it stay running? is it going to exist in six months?) and the trustworthiness of the admin (are they someone who you can deal with in terms of moderation? do you trust they’re not going to use their access to violate any trusts or behave in a way contrary to your beliefs?).
I’m old enough that my first foray into ‘federated’ content was Fidonet, and which BBS you called ‘home’ and posted from was almost exclusively a decision based on the local BBS community and the sysop because the messages and software were otherwise exactly the same from BBS to BBS.
So, my bias is that large instances can’t be close communities and that larger instances require different and more aggressive and impersonal moderation and the bigger you get the more true both become.