There should have been a not saying NOT to join the top nost instances. I know registration with them is without manual aproval (you register, log in, that’s it), but they’re overloaded. Trust me when I say this, it’s better to wait a few hours for your account to be approved on another less loaded instance than to have the account right there and then on an overloaded instance.
Dude it was set up less than three weeks ago by volunteers and is funded by donations. It is what it is. Even commercial websites can feel slow under load, that’s just how the Internet works.
Lemmy is decently old but it is Open Source so it is built by people in their free time
Lemmy is built to be defederated meaning that we are supposed to have many small instances instead of one massive one like reddit
Lemmy.world is new, created in the fallout of the API change for sure
All of that is to say, yes we are going through growing pains. Lemmy wasnt designed or tested at this scale for single instances before so we are kind of at the bleeding edge right now. Do with that what you will but I am enjoying talking to y’all enough that I’ll stick through it.
I don’t get why lemmy.world doesn’t close signups until they ironed out the issues. In the last 2-3 days, my feed was pretty much full of people whining about “Lemmy performance” and almost everyone was from lemmy.world.
Why not just sign up with one of the other instances? I said it and will say it again: This is a federated system. It doesn’t matter much which instance you register an account with. I run my own public instance and I see all the content without having issues at all.
join-lemmy.org should be revised to not suggest big instances all the time. It should be shuffled. This will cause a bad user experience for everyone and people will think this is Lemmy’s fault in general.
Most people default to the main server. It’s easier that way. A major weakness of Lemmy is how if I use the main URL of another instance, it will say I’m not logged in, and I have to cut and paste a parameter and paste it onto the end of Lemmy.world to gain access. It’s kind of annoying so since most of the main action is on Lemmy.world, I prefer to make an account here and stay within this instance as much as I can.
I personally use a userscript in the browser to avoid that. But for the normal user, it’s probably an issue, yes. But honestly, I don’t have to do what you describe all that often. I just find what I’m searching for using my instance’s search feature and all the “action” from other instances appears in my feed just fine and I can interact with it, as if I was on that instance the action is happening on. I do have a seeder script running on the server, though. It periodically searches for trending communities on the larger instances and pulls that in. Pretty much the same thing that’d happen if a regular user on my instance would look up communities on other servers.
I made an iOS shortcut so I can click it in the share menu and it’ll load a search for the current url on my instance’s search. Works well enough for now.
Funny thing, I landed at join-lemmy.org when I first decided to (mostly) bail from reddit. I do not know how but I was redirected to sign-up on lemmy.one, relatively small. Users can’t create communities here but I don’t have time for that shit anyway.
There is 1 server running the instance you are on. One. For tens of thousands of people. Compare that to millions of servers that the biggest social sites use.
It even distributed to other instances. I see the complaint from kbin.social, a totally different interface and server. Some things are working okay, it seems. Perhaps OP is just put off by how different it looks and feels from Reddit (which would often be broken and down too). There's user styles to make the pages look more "Reddit-like" if it's just appearances. But why stick to the old, when you can try new things?
I just realized that OP even found a Reddit-inspired community to post their gripe on. It seems to work well enough.
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