I've been seeing that error, and sometimes when I click on a post it sends me to an error page instead. Reloading seems to work, eventually.

A lot of bots were spamming the instance which was causing an IO bottleneck, and thus timeout issues. We're looking into solutions to limit their impact, such as rate-limiting users. We're trying to do it in such a way that it doesn't impact regular users which is why it's taking a bit longer.

theres apparently some bots running around posting from it as well, may or may not be causing extra load

Ya been getting errors and I'm using the world instance. I imagine it's server capacity and the amount of people posting, joining etc (which is a good thing if that's the case with people coming over)

It’s A LOT worse on lemmy.world, I’d say most of the instances are overloaded that prime time instances.