has lemmy.world been going down these past few days or is it the app I use?
For hours today, yesterday, and intermittently since I've been on here (a month or so) lemmy stops loading using jerboa, liftoff, and a web browser.
The site isn't listed on any down detector I know of, and each app gives different errors but ultimately just won't load.
It's often enough that recently when I consider jumping on here I just don't because there will probably be an issue. Ranging from not loading, JSON errors, or just blank screens and my comments not working..
What's going on? Is there a status page for these places?
I bailed on them for now and made an account on a much smaller instance so everything loads again. Thankfully with federation you can still see all the same content, you just need to set up subscriptions again on the new account if you choose to go that route.
I was really surprised by this too but yeah, people want to be on the same largest instance. I guess it's a community feeling by doing that. Or at least a feeling of safety, since it's unlikely the instance shuts down.
In addition to a large instance being less likely to shut down and (presumably) having more resources, there's an additional advantage to being on a larger instance: you have a more comprehensive "All" feed. Since federation with a remote feed isn't established until (IIRC) someone subscribes to it, an instance with a larger user base should contain more subscriptions to a wider variety of content. Of course, not everyone will like that and you lose out on Beehaw content if you're on the two largest Lemmy instances, but I think it applies in general.
At this point, I don't believe lemmy.world will shut down. But the constant outages are going to push people away regardless. Luckily people have nearly limitless options of instances to join.
Though, the average schmo just recently coming from Reddit won't understand "Instances" or "federation", and just give up on Lemmy as a platform overall once they see how unstable it is. lemmy.world is currently the front-door to the fediverse for a lot of people here.
I've used Lemmy Account Settings Instance Migrator, which migrates your blocked communities and settings as well as your subscriptions. It worked for me, but YMMV as the developer says it's alpha software.
I saw someone suggest Connect for Lemmy yesterday, Android app that has both instance blocking and keyword filtering. Overall the app is fine but until I find something I love that supports the filtering it's more than sufficient.
That's been one of the biggest drawbacks for me personally. Who wants to go through collecting all of these communities, just to have the server crash and be forced to re-collect on a different instance? It's very cumbersome, right now, and I hope that eventually it can be a bit more seamless somehow.
But it has some limitations like your private messages will not be transferred. Also, I never tried this so don't complain to me if something goes wrong :)