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 do agree with that. This is definitely a barrier of entry. But you can’t really completely get rid of it without taking away what makes lemmy what it is: A federated network and it’s integral to what it is trying to acheive.
What I do believe you can do is mitigate it. “Default servers” could be part of that. Again I can only advocate for regional servers. In the bigger countries you can make that based on a 1 default server per state or region/province level. In smaller countries even one instance per country might be enough. People would automatically be on an instance that is uses their native language. You could also kinda slowly introduce them to the idea of federation like that: “This is the instance for your country. But you can also explore other countries and interact with their people”.
Somebody could create a landing page to automatically pick an instance for a user based on what language their system is set to and their IP adress. A German user goes to the website and gets to pick the state they live in. They are getting suggested a server that correlates to whatever state they picked.
Obviously for now it would be overkill to create an instance for every single state. But hopefully we will get there.
Right now the recommended instances on join-lemmy.org are actually based on your system language, so we’re halfway there.
oh that’s great
To be honest I feel like even that’s too complicated. Most people don’t really care about the great technology behind the product; they just want a product that works. That’s in part why the current large social media networks are so large; registration is so easy. The moment you add friction in the form of learning how federation works, normal users will become jaded and just decide not to join the network. If the goal right now is to improve the network effect offered by lemmy, we need to do as much as possible to minimize the amount of people we turn away.
This isn’t to say that we should focus completely on the “default instances”. I agree that ultimately the goal should be to have people move to smaller instances which take advantage of more of lemmy’s wider philosophy. But I think that the first step should be to introduce people to the concept of the fediverse, and then have them interact with it as intended.