when I start writing this comment, the post is 47 minutes old. if I understand the linked page properly, lemmy.world has been functional (all green checkmarks) for the past 10 minutes which is the furthest back the data goes. All the other instances are all green except for lemmy.one which is all red. I am assuming that 47 minutes ago, lemmy.world had red boxes?
Maybe a different link would have explained the point better but I don't really see how a 30 minute (??) server outage during an upgrade is compelling to avoid a large instance. Are you suggesting it's better to use a server whos admins don't upgrade? If not, is there really any size of server that would meaningfully avoid this kind of occasional disruption? Seems to me that the dynamism of the environment will inevitably lead to various problems. That's part of the experience. TBH threadiverse uptime on the whole is pretty impressive for such a ragtag groups of admins and devs.
I have accounts on some smaller servers but they have their drawbacks too. Using a bigger server is more convenient because the people and content is already there. It's easier. I didn't plan to use lemmy.world but I ended up making account there to use sometimes.
I think in a year or so the situation might be different. I see the ideological point and I would like it to be true. Maybe the technology will catch up. I think it would be nice to be able to programmatically seed content, but maybe that would be obnoxious to admins.
I didn't track the timing too closely, but in the last few weeks there have been quite long disruption of service due to DDoS attacks on the largest instances.
I am personally quite tolerant towards Lemmy as a platform in its very infancy, but some other users might want to quit it due to this kind of annoyances, hence my comment about moving to a smaller instance.
the people and content is already there. It’s easier
What do you mean? You can access all of the content in the Threadiverse from whatever instance, modulo defederation, but Lemmy.world defederates quite a few instances too, so that's valid for both big and small instances.
If you are talking about the "All" feed, which will indeed be empty if you are in a 10 people instances (communities need to be subscribed by an instance member for the instance to get the community content), then it's a valid issue, and that's why I suggest people to move to one of the 24 biggest instances that are not LW or Lemmy.ml
Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.one, your country instance (if it's big enough).
I'm on sopuli since a while now, and I'm very happy with the experience. 680 monthly active users, so the All feed is pretty much identical to the one on Lemmy.world, except the vey niche community I either don't care about or would already know by myself.
The biggest issue I see with having everyone on LW is that at some point the costs will be too high for the admins. It's quite a big risk, and that why I'm advocating to use smaller instances.
@Blaze as I understand it, if you are user on a small server, you only see content from communities that others on your sever have previously subbed to previously, or if you do so yourself. And then you only seen content from the moment of subscription on. There is no way to see back prior.
So if you want to use a community like !fediverse it's OK because its popular and there will be prior subs. but if you are interested in !rockingchairrepair you will miss all prior discussion. Am I incorrect?
Also in practice, from my experiments, there seem to be inconsistencies in how even this works.
When I mean a small server, I mean one of the top 20, which at least a few hundred users.
As I said elsewhere, with a few hundreds users, the chance of you stumbling upon a community that nobody else subscribes to is that either the community is dead, or it just started, or indeed it is very niche.
The only case where you want discussions from the start is the last case, which is very less likely to happen once your instance reaches a few thousands users (which is the scenario most of the people hope once we spread more evenly).