Yea it's one of those awkward things I suppose, where the instance (.world) is big enough that its operational concerns are kinda at odds with where lemmy as a project is up to.

With that many users, who also kinda expect a more reddit-style experience AFAICT, a certain amount of professionalism, stability and, in effect, slowness, is expected. And that's great.

But meanwhile lemmy is a small essentially underfunded project doing its best with a small group (2 main and a few voluntary on the side), which means bugs and then bug fixes and tweaking until things work ... all of which works well over a distributed array of smaller instances so that no single node is a major let alone fatal point of failure.

And so we've got this situation now where you could be critical of how lemmy.world relates to the bug fixing and testing load on the lemmy-verse. lemmy.world is likely the best funded instance (last I checked their donations exceed their infra needs) and yet the job of testing and working through bugs is offloaded onto all of the other smaller instances while they wait until it's all been ironed out. I don't know if it's a fair critique in the end, but it certainly seems to be there and worth considering.

[–] Blaze@discuss.online 11 points 10 months ago (10 children)

Interesting point.

On the other side, as LW is more cautious about updates, that might have suggested some users to switch to instances that were more up-to-date.

But indeed I agree that people should be more spread, having 25% of Lemmy on one instance is less than ideal: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I disagree about the 25% bit. Federation as a feature is overstressed. It's very important, but it doesn't have much of an effect on the user experience.

Federation is the freedom to get away from shitty admins and mods. Federation is the opportunity to revolt.

But you don't need to be in a constant state of revolution. Just having the opportunity doesn't mean you have to use it.

[–] Blaze@discuss.online 6 points 10 months ago

To each their own. Recently, the issue with lemmy.ml defederating ani.social shows that those issues are still very present today.

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