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.
The reason you're being downvoted is because you experienced a problem (Posts from your instance won't show up in this instance), came up with a pet theory for why that problem might be happening (This instance must be dropping posts from small instances because it's overloaded from all the users), assumed it was correct (Based on what, exactly? Because it's definitely not correct), then came here to post about it in a very confrontational, demanding, and accusatory tone, with a seeming lack of desire or ability to consider that you may be the mistaken one. Moreso, the change you're suggesting would have dramatic and perhaps negative repercussions for both this instance and Lemmy as a whole.
AKA, "we are too big to fail"?
I'm too old for internet drama and I think that if we want the fediverse to win we need to be a lot more mindful of the collective and avoid tribal thinking. But honestly, this shit with lemmy.world is starting to get a bit weird. I mean, the lemmy devs were recommending from the beginning to not have overly large instances, yet the admins here kept ignoring this and hoarding more people. What is the endgame?
100% of this drama was self-inflicted. You could have PMed an admin describing your problem and asking if they knew what was up. They seem like pretty helpful and reasonable people to me.
Doesn't really follow from any of what anyone has said - we're not talking about lemmy.world failing, we're talking about it closing registration. The one thing Lemmy needs to survive long-term is more active users. Putting up barriers to that, especially on the most popular instance, will hurt growth for the entire lemmyverse - because if there's one thing new users implicitly don't understand, it's how federation works. A decent portion of people who try to sign up and fail will just give up and go back to reddit, and we're all worse-off for it.
Not to mention that most people who do successfully join figure out how federation works pretty fast, and are more than capable of moving to another instance if they consider any of what you've mentioned important to them at all.
They don't need to be in the same instance
Then we take that as an opportunity to educate them instead of tricking them out into believing that it is a good idea to put them all in the same server.
They will also go back to reddit if they join a server that is constantly having outages.
No one, not even the lemmy.world admins, are suggesting that. In this very thread they've mentioned imminent plans to educate new users about other instances during the sign-up process.
Nobody is being tricked here, and you need a seriously warped view of the situation to think otherwise.
You're still making the same incorrect assumption that your original post made, that the stability issues are even tangentially related to user count instead of ongoing attacks. But again - new users figure out federation within a few days. If the outages bother them they're smart enough to know they can try a different instance and now likely have the experience needed to know which one may be the best fit for them.
The issue is not causation, but correlation. Any entity that stands out in an otherwise distributed system are more likely to become a target. Can you agree to that?
I can agree to that, but I can not and will not agree to the implication that the solution is simply to have no large instances. Federation has a lot of strengths, but it has a lot of weaknesses as well - there are drawbacks to large instances, but there are lots of benefits too, to both the instance and Lemmy as a whole, and closing new registrations invalidates that.
The instance is already large as it is. Closing down registrations will not reduce the size of the instance. It will just stop it from growing even more and it would give a chance for other instances to help spread the load.
Closing registrations will reduce the size because users are dynamic: New users join and old users leave with any system. Close registration and you're left with only old users leaving.
I also disagree with the implicit argument that lemmy.world is "large enough". It's large compared to most other instances - but in terms of long-term stability I think the lemmyverse needs at least 10x the active user count it currently has and ideally much more than that. They don't all have to join lemmy.world, but closing the registration page for the most popular onboarding point for the lemmyverse is going to slow growth no matter how you implement it.
Closing registrations to "spread the load" also comes with the assumption that server load from active users is a problem. By all accounts it is not a problem, at all, for lemmy.world. If a time comes where there are so many users that it is, maybe they'll consider something like this.
Yes, of course, and this is what needs to change!
First, slowing down growth != stopping growth.
Second, your idea of "growth" seems to imply that we should accept systemic disruptions to the people that are already here. To illustrate the point: assume that the reason that my instance got blocked is indeed because the IP got into some banlist. Through no fault of my own and no change of behavior on my side, I'm now locked out of the conversation with 50% of the Lemmy userbase. Do you think that's it's wise/reasonable?
No, that's not my point. My point is that if one server fucks up, the others don't get locked out of communication with 50% of the userbase. Closing down registrations would reduce the split.
Think of it in this way... if lemmy.world has 50/60/70% of the userbase and if for some reason it gets disconnected from the fediverse, the admins can just shrug it off and say "oopsie, we will try to fix it whenever, in the meantime come and join us because it works here." The minority gets screwed, but there is little incentive for the majority to care. On the other hand, if lemmy.world has "only" 15-30% of the userbase and there are other servers of similar size, if lemmy.world screws up, it will be in their interest to fix it.
Do you understand it now, and do you understand why me having to create an account here in order to be able to make myself heard is so disturbing?
I disagree that just having large instances, in and of itself, is a problem.
Slowing growth is still a gigantic downside when growth is one of the most important needs for the platform.
For your scenario: You could argue that this is actually a good thing from your perspective. You realized there was a problem because lemmy.world is so big. If most instances were of equal size you likely wouldn't have noticed there was a problem at all. I'm willing to bet there are other instances you have the same problem with and just haven't noticed because of how much smaller they are - but lemmy.world's size helps bring problems like this to light, so they can be fixed.
That would be spreading the power, rather than spreading the load, on a semantic note.
I don't disagree with this section in principle - but I do still disagree that the solution is to close registrations. The admins have already stated they have plans to inform new users about other instances during the registration process, and soon. That's a good faith effort and a good middle ground.
You having to create an account here isn't because lemmy.world is too large - it's because of software issues. You mentioned elsewhere that you made a post from your own instance about the problem (I assume in this community, otherwise why would you expect that to work?) - but if your problem was that content from your instance wasn't showing up in lemmy.world, I'm not really sure why you expected that to work. It's not disturbing that you had to create an account here, because you would have had to do so even in the hypothetical scenario where there are, say, 20 main instances with about 4.5% of the active userbase each.
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.
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".
Having the inability of saying "we can't do it, but you can be happy on X, Y and Z" feels like a twisted way of saying "we don't really care about you, we care about having you".
Anyway, thank you for at least trying to engage in a productive conversation. Everyone else seems to just want to feel personally attacked and completely missing the point.
...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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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."
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.
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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.
If you're too old for internet drama, why are you starting it? There's more mature ways to go about this than petitioning to have an instance that isn't yours shut down registration.
You also don't seem willing to work with the admins to figure out what is really wrong.
If you have an issue, take it up with the admins privately before jumping to conclusions and starting a petition that doesn't even do anything except cause drama.
First, I am not talking about shutting the instance down, I talking about closing down registrations - at least until their stability issues are solved.
Second, do you understand that (to an outsider) what this instance is doing is akin to environmental pollution? Of course the petition will come from someone who is "not from here", because those are the ones that end up being affected by it!
So now youre changing your excuses. And you still didn't address the root of all the drama you're causing. Good job avoiding any kind of personal responsibility for all the drama and creating even more. Have you gone to lemmy.ml and demanded the same thing? What about beehaw? What about any other instance than this one? Maybe you should just defed from this instance instead of demanding a bunch of stuff that may not even help your original issue. Or any of the other issues you keep bringing up.
Again, did you even try to contact the admins prior to this? Did you ask the devs of lemmy for assistance? Did you do anything other than make up excuses in your head to hate lemmy.world?
Edit: You're probably making all this stuff up since you don't want to address anything.
I don't have to, the lemmy.ml admins themselves are telling others to join other instances and are doing their part to make sure that the system works.
Do you realize that my complaint is because this is exactly what is happening in practice against my own desires? I can see (most) of the messages that come to my instance, but any message that I am write on my instance never shows up here.
My "original issue" is just a symptom of a larger problem: there is one instance in the fediverse that is growing in a dysfunctional way, like a tumor, and this is causing systemic faults elsewhere. There is a way that this instance could help mitigate this problem (close down registrations until it is better organized and/or there are other instances that can withstand the growth as well) yet the admins have refused to take this measure with (IMHO, seemingly) poor justifications.
Actually, yes, I wrote a post from my instance hoping it would reach here.
I am really not interested in doxxing myself. Would you blame me, given that I'm apparently in the weak end of a confrontation with a tiny mob?
Let me repeat. My instance not being to communicate with this is a symptom of a much larger issue: lemmy.world is growing in an unsustainable and irresponsible way, and this is bringing systemic risks to the system as a whole.
So, no, the post is not about "dropped comments". The post is hopefully a wake-up call to tell you that this attitude of "let's keep bringing users no matter what" is cancerous.
And yes, I did say something to that before in previous interactions, and the response was not that different from this post: a myopic defensiveness, perhaps based on their personal belief that what they are doing is good/ethical, even when others are crying out "this way will bring us all to chaos".
Honest question: how many different admins do you think it would take for you to consider changing your mind about it?
If I post any proof, I'd be doxxing myself and it should be clear by now that I won't do that. The last time I said "hey, maybe you should slow down growth", I was met with the implication that I was saying that out of personal interest.
So, no. I will not let the admins try to deflect from their irresponsible attitude by trying to make some character assassination.
Yeah, I've got no dog in this fight but you do seem to be coming across as a bit of a dingus.
In my work, when someone comes to me and assumes I or my team is screwing up because they "eliminated all possibilities at hand" 90% of the time, they screwed up and didn't realize it.
People rarely make mistakes knowingly. Quite often there's something they didn't know or overlooked. If I had to wager, my money would be on you overlooking some small detail.
I mean, another easy example, you're taking downvotes as some sign the mods and admins are fighting to maintain the status quo, instead of, y'know, you might be coming off as a bit of a dick...
Yeah, at that point the onus is on the person putting forth the problem to show their work. Start listing off possibilities that you've eliminated. You can have thirty years of technical experience and still be completely useless by assuming that you're just as smart as the person you're explaining the problem to.
"I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand"? Naw man, anyone dropping that line has only eliminated all possibilities that they can think of, and all of that supposed thinking about "all the possibilities" is worthless if they aren't going to offer it up as a starting point.