Yeah I like it cause it's got better UI's than reddit and users get to pick. There's a few features I'd like to add (I'm a dev) that I think would also make it better than reddit.
I do think the front-page is kinda uninviting with how much patting-ourselves-on-the-back there is (nobody talks about how great reddit is on the front-page). But other than that, I think better experience is where Lemmy can shine. The best part is each instance can try there own features to see what sticks.
Agreed, in my original post I mentioned posts per day as a metric thats slightly closer to actual load. But its pretty hard to throttle number of posts, so I think users is going to be a more useful value.
If a server has really active users they can set a lower target number of users.
Eventually it would be nice to have a standardized way of migrating and backing up accounts to make it possible for one server to offload its existing users to another server.
I agree capacity isn't the cause of outages. Centralization is an issue, and capacity is a way for a server like Lemmy.world to say "I would prefer less new users"
Yes! Lemmy.world (or any other big server) must manually add the-other-server to their "recommder" list. So the-other-server has to prove to Lemmy.world that they're going to offer similar reliability.
There's a posposal for an automatic user distribution system (original post here: https://lemm.ee/post/2800726). Showing support for it would be a big help!
The idea would be to not add barriers to entry for new users or require servers to advertise/add barriers to entry themselves.
I think we should ask the reverse questions;
Why should severs have to manually advertise themselves and manually erect barriers-to-entry (which are both crude/slow techniques for hitting a target number of users) when Lemmy.world could almost instantly send them all the new users they desire, stop exactly when they're full, and do it in a completely automated way?
Why should new inexperienced users have to deal with barriers to entry and then have to search around for some obscure Lemmy instance on their own, when we could automatically guide them to an obcure server looking for new members?
New servers can still use their old/existing methods, but if they want they could "opt-in" by asking to be on the recommded-server list of Lemmy.world (or whoever)
Getting on the front page of Google is hard and Lemmy.world has done it. Instead of that achievement working against us (and having to manually tell/confuse people saying "please don't just sign up for lemmy.world") why not leverage that achievement to create a maximally-distrubted system. Cause we can eat our good-user-experience cake (Google "Lemmy", click on the first link, put in sign up information) and still have our dont-put-everyone-on-one-server cake too.
I think both your idea, and the criticism in the comments are valid (and I'm really glad to see this kind of discussion).
One potential solution, that would sadly require a major technical change, would be for awards to cost hosting-resources instead of money. For example, if Lemmy used IPFS, then people giving awards could need to pin some amount of files for some amount of time in exchange for an award.
This means every award would make Lemmy MORE decenalized, which also helps with admin costs of hosting servers.
I love when a comment gets more upvotes than the original post