Nice! That did it! Thank you so much!

Thank you, unfortunately I don’t think it worked. My posts from the last week or so are still not visible here.

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.

–

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.

Sorry, I am starting to get tired of repeating myself. Can you go through my history and see the 3 or 4 comments where I am arguing that the main point of my post is not specifically about the technical issue that is affecting me, but instead a larger point about how this idea that letting one instance grow and dominating the userbase while having so many issues is irresponsible?

That is completely off the mark, but it’s interesting: lemmy.world’s approach to growth is reckless and causing issues elsewhere, someone is calling it out, and yet you are trying to make this about me instead of addressing the problem that am pointing out.

They have NO reason to dox you.

If I get into details to explain why they do have reason to dox me, it could be used to dox me. Kind of tricky and maybe I’m being paranoid, but I don’t want to risk it.

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.

Instead of counting, try reading. It’s not about “the technical problem”. It’s about the fact that my instance:

• has not done anything wrong
• is wrongly being cut off with communication from half of the whole fediverse
• the admins don’t see any problem with this erratic growth and the ripple effects is causing elsewhere
• I am literally getting told by the majority to “go back where I came from”.

Let me see if I can it myself clear: If lemmy.world was 10-20% of the whole userbase, I wouldn’t have to care about them. But because they are growing so much and don’t seem to be intent of self-regulating, their growing pains is causing problems to those in the minority instances.

I don’t mind repeating it or trying to find different ways to explain it, but the point I’d like you all to understand is that lemmy.world needs to organize itself before focusing on further growth, and this is why I am asking to close the registrations.

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/[email protected] 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.

You know what else is an even worse user experience? When people are basically forced to assimilate with the Borg instead of being able to participate from their own side of things, through no fault of their own.