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.
Regional servers are great, especially when it comes to regional laws and customs which people generally want applied (for example UK has quite strong Hate Crime laws, I’m sure DE does too).
I do think however, in early stages, I’d rather know who is running my instance and a few of their personal opinions. For example, are they going to defederate with an instance I quite like because of politics? We are really in early days here and these instances are very unstable whereas the mastodon instances have all been around with thousands of users for quite a time.