Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.
But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
It would also be cool to be able to not have communities be locked to where they’re created or at least make them mobile.
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on [email protected] it can merge with [email protected] and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
I think the best option to bridge the gap between nearly identical communities on different instances (and even the same instance) would be some kind of post tagging.
Say you post something on lemmy.ml/c/piracy but has to do with bittorrent or something. The original post can get a piracy and bittorrent tag that you can click on that to see all posts across instances with that tag. Kinda like hashtags and such on mastodon work, but on lemmy.
The thing about reddit clones is I think they try to be too much like reddit. The best thing about leaving reddit and starting new platforms is that they can really be anything the community wants it to be.