I believe what you’re experiencing is just part of the growing pains of Lemmy. I’m here from reddit as well, and something to keep in mind is this: According to the-federation.info, on May 1st of this year, there were 2,750 active users on Lemmy. Today, there are 85,045 active users, an increase of ~31x. The sorting algorithms for content on Lemmy are meant to handle a few dozen posts a day, not thousands. This causes things like Hot to show four year old posts just a few pages in, or the same article to be posted to the many duplicate communities that are springing up as Lemmy explodes in size. Over time, centralization will happen to a degree (it’s already happening with lemmy.world vastly outstripping lemmy.ml as the largest instance), which will consolidate the horde of communities into only a few, like how subreddits that offered the same type of content eventually consolidate into one or two.

Is there really a meaningful difference between /r/damnthatsinteresting and /r/interestingasfuck (prior to the protests)? Not really, but then there’s also /r/interesting, /r/mildlyinteresting, /r/moldlyinteresting, /r/interestingaf, /r/interestinggifs, /r/utterlyinteresting, /r/interestingbutcreepy, /r/reallyinteresting… I think you see the point. Right now, you’re subscribed to ALL of those, and people are aggressively trying to grow each one, which means they see a LOT of duplicate content. As Lemmy stabilizes, a lot of them will wither and essentially die off. It just takes time. The tough part is not knowing which communities will become THE community for a topic, so subscribing to all of them for now makes sure you won’t miss it.

Did you miss where I said this?

I respect those who would like a more curated experience and there are instances for that

I… Didn’t criticize them? I’m very confused where your vitriol came from.

I have yet to notice downtime, and I browse pretty often. It’s pretty fast, too. I haven’t noticed any major slowdown.

It’s not that the people on vlemmy were “shown the door” everywhere else. It was merely the people who decided they wanted to choose for themselves which doors they would enter, and not be told by an admin they couldn’t enter certain doors. The instance I’m on now isn’t defederated with anything either, and if it ever does, I’ll find a new one that doesn’t. I don’t like being told which parts of the internet I’m not intelligent enough to decide for myself about how I feel. I can curate my own feed by simply blocking communities I don’t like, or by only subscribing to ones I do and browsing the Subscribed feed. I get burggit.moe and lemmygrad.ml and exploding-heads and all the other ones people don’t like, and if I see a community on any of them I don’t like, then it’s MY job to block it from my view, not an admins. I respect those who would like a more curated experience and there are instances for that, but don’t assume everyone who is in support of completely open federation is a pedo, nazi, socialist, fascist, or ANYTHING else. It just means they want to decide for themselves.

Vlemmy.net was my first home instance. The admin was responsive, transparent, and, most importantly for me, had a fairly absolutist perspective on free speech, refusing to defederate with anything at all, preferring to leave the choice up to the user. Unfortunately for him and the users, the Irish government, where Vlemmy.net was hosted, has a less favorable view of certain communities that it inevitably federated with.

Because federation causes copies of content to be saved to each federated instance, he wound up finding out that certain communities hosted content that, once saved onto HIS server, would get him sentenced to the Irish equivalent of “Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison”. He defederated those instances, but the next day, Vlemmy.net was all but gone. His payment sites for donations now all lead to closed accounts, and I have not heard anything about anyone getting in contact with him.

The common understanding is that he got spooked by the potential legal ramifications, and either got a visit from the Irish authorities or was afraid of that possibility, and so chose to pre-emptively pull the plug. This all occured roughly two weeks ago.

It’s mainly because you’re on lemmy.ml. They defederated lemmynsfw and pornlemmy, which are the biggest nsfw instance and a fast-growing nsfw instance respectively. You need to join another instance that is fine with nsfw federation to see it.