stability is nice but reliability is also very important.

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”.

since the issue was that your instance was failing to federate to lemmy.world.

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.

because it’s not accurate to say lemmy.world is full

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.

The success of lemmy.world has nothing to do with bias or unfair practices.

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.”

I’d wager it’s 90% word-of-mouth.

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 most instances were of equal size you likely wouldn’t have noticed there was a problem at all.

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.

That’s a good faith effort and a good middle ground.

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.

If they support you, then come together as a group and address the admins

Honest question: how many different admins do you think it would take for you to consider changing your mind about it?

since you say you contacted the admins directly, post the proof,

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.

It’s large compared to most other instances

Yes, of course, and this is what needs to change!

going to slow growth no matter how you implement it.

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?

Closing registrations to “spread the load” also comes with the assumption that server load from active users is a problem.

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?

WHICH YOU STATED THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY ABOUT.

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”.

Aside from version updates, I haven’t changed my server setup since I set it up months ago, and my instance has only a handful of active users. Only two of them subscribed to !fediverse.

Also, keep in mind that I am receiving updates just fine (maybe with some delay) the problem is that nothing I post on the lemmy.world communities end up visible here.

will not agree to the implication that the solution is simply to have no large instances.

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.

Isn’t the banlist public, available in the modlog?

Have you gone to lemmy.ml and demanded the same thing?

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.

Maybe you should just defed?

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.

may not even help your original issue.

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.

Again, did you even try to contact the admins prior to this?

Actually, yes, I wrote a post from my instance hoping it would reach here.

You’re probably making all this stuff up since you don’t want to address anything.

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?

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.

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?

You don’t need my instance to help me here. I already asked: can I just take the comment from https://lemmy.world/u/Wander@yiffit.net as an indication that I can bump the updated value in the instance record? If I run something like UPDATE instance SET updated = 'NOW()' WHERE domain = 'lemmy.world', will the communication be re-established?

petitioning to have an instance that isn’t yours shut down.

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!

The one thing Lemmy needs to survive long-term is more active users.

They don’t need to be in the same instance

because if there’s one thing new users implicitly don’t understand, it’s how federation works.

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.

A decent portion of people who try to sign up and fail will just give up and go back to reddit

They will also go back to reddit if they join a server that is constantly having outages.

• I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand.
• The only one that offered some hint at a solution was not related to this instance, and was not demanding to know my instance beforehand.
• The stated reason given to not close registrations fails any smell test.

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?

I’m also here to expose bad excuses.

As for help, @Wander@yiffit.net has pointed me to the right direction, and he didn’t need to know my instance to do so…

My instance is not meant to be “popular”. It’s just for me and some friends, it’s federating just fine, I can receive all the posts but whatever I write does not get here.

If people land here and are not able to register they might not look into it further and give up because

Sorry, that’s a really bad excuse. Lemmy allows to have custom messages/taglines on the registration page, why not just add a quick paragraph saying “registration is closed because this server is overwhelmed, but here is a list of servers that you can use”.

Make it a rotating list, change it every 2-3 days if you want.

As for why I am not naming my instance: this post went to -1 as soon as it got posted. My comments are also being downvoted quite quickly. I don’t believe that I am being rude or uncivil, yet it feels like mods and admins are more worried about fighting to keep the status quo than helping the community at large, and I’d worry about retaliation.

Why is it so vital for you to keep registrations open? Can you please help me understand the logic behind it?