This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
Fair point, but my original point/issue still stands. The admin here is saying “lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead” and that advice isn’t really helpful, at least in the present state of things. Right now, we have an influx of novice users coming in from Reddit, and other servers either not accepting applications at the moment, or they are tooniche/specific (or inflexible, like Beehaw); finally at the moment, majority of the content is on lemmy.ml. So the end result is that lemmy.ml is one of the main viable servers.
If people join some random server which doesn’t have the content they’re after, they’ll either lose interest, OR they may continue to consume the content on emmy.ml via federation, but then that’s not really going to solve the load issue since the content on lemmy.ml isn’t distributed/replicated.
I understand your point of ever growing data and how it may be better if that data is transient and not there forever, but for a news aggregator and forum type social network like Reddit (and now Lemmy), data is everything. If that data isn’t available, or not going to available in the future, or will not be visible to audiences due to it being on some random server, it’s going to give content creators much incentive to create content, and no content == no users. This sort of model/thinking will be doomed to failure, or be forever relegated to niche/enthusiast status, where only niche communities will thrive on specific servers targeting that niche. Which I guess is the ultimate goal of federation where every topic/community has its own server? But to get there, you’ll need interested users, and to get users to be interested you need a stable, singular place you can point them to, where they can post content knowing. And maybe, as that server grows, the admin could start splitting off the larger communities into their own individual instances?