11,263 lbs, huh? It’s not a kind estimate, but not unrealistic either.

Lemmy.world has been under repeated attack recently though, and the behaviors you’ve described match what I see when th service is down. You can see current status and the history of frequent incidents at https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/.

To relate to your statement about what fails and how, I can say I’ve seen the failure-modes change as they adapt the setup, and it’s a more complex stack than other lemmy instances in order to deal with the attacks and large scale. It degrades in complex ways that are hard to fully reason about unless you’re pretty deeply familiar with how things are out together.

I suspect you’re seeing a combination of “lemmy world is broken sometimes”, “Cloudflare gives weird errors sometimes”, and “clients cache things or degrade to unauthenticated connections sometimes”. But in any case, seeing lemmy.world be flaky is not weird, it’s having a heckuva time.

It’s not guaranteed that every federated app integrates with every other federated app in a particularly useful way. You kind of need to take it on an app by app basis:

• Kbin and lemmy integrate very well. “Magazines” on kbin show up as communities in lemmy. You have almost certainly already read and responded to posts and comments from kbin users, and you may have subscribed to communities on kbin.social, the largest kbin instance. Interacting between the two is pretty much seamless.
• Mastodon and Lemmy integrate, but less completely. If you’ve seen a post full of #hashtags and with an @thecommunity@instance mention, that’s probably from a mastodon user. I’m not sure how a lemmy user can initiate contact with a mastodon user, but a mastodon user can at-mention a lemmy community as if it were a mastodon user and doing that will create a lemmy post. Comments on the lemmy post look like replies to the mastodon toot.

Other fediverse projects will interact in varying specific ways, and you need to figure each pair out individually.

For anyone wanting more context, OPs article re-reports and links to https://www.wdsu.com/article/louisiana-heart-doctor-says-he-is-leaving-state-due-to-discriminatory-anti-lgbtq-law/44706683# , which has more quotes from the doctor.

Point 1 was indeed kinda a joke, but if you feel like that hurts the rule, I will remove it.

I feel like you wouldn’t and shouldn’t accept the justification from a commenter that their trolling was a joke. You also wouldn’t consider it an improvement to make a racist joke alongside the rule against racism as a tongue in cheek way of illustrating the rule by counter-example. It simply is the thing the rule purports to disallow, which isn’t a great joke and doesn’t help the rule.

As stated in the rule, we will only remove posts if the title is wrong / incorrect, with that we mean that it misrepresents the article. The autobot can’t sense that you editted the post to make it better, so I just wanted to make clear that the autobot will still message you.

I might suggest to extend the rule with something like: While de-clickbaiting and de-editorializing poor upstream titles with replacement factual titles is allowed, when in doubt using the upstream title is always sensible. Having the modbot inform people about title deviations by quoting the rule including the bit about de-editorializing seems reasonable.

Trolling is also not allowed, go back to reddit for that.

Telling someone to go back to reddit to troll is itself a mild form of trolling and fails to model the behavior the rule calls for. It contributes nothing to the meaning or clarity of the rule and the rule is better without it.

Sources should be as unbiased and reliable as possible Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion.

This rule would be improved by listing media source bias/fact-checkers that the mods largely trust, even if they reserve the right to occasionally override public checkers. The ability to pre-screen a source with fair reliability is valuable to posters.

Post titles should be the same as the article used as source Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title is wrong / incorrect, the post will be deleted.

Even reliable news sources frequently editorialize their titles at this point. I’d appreciate a carve-out to de-editorialize a clickbait title, but I appreciate that title-matching is much easier to understand/enforce and that people are likely to try to abuse a de-clickbaiting clause to re-clickbait and bias their titles. If a culture where people modified titles to improve titles could be fostered, that would be neat.

As an individual?

• Browse for communities to sub on lemmyverse.net rather than your instance’s community list. It will show apples to apples activity rankings.
• If you do use your instance’s community browser, cross-reference subscriber counts by visiting the community’s page on its home instance. That will provide a comparable sub count to what’s shown for local communities on your instance.
• Pay attention to how mods behave. Do they have a well-specified set of rules in the sidebar? Do they organize megathreads when necessary? Stalk them on the modlog to see if they are fairly enforcing the rules or power-tripping. This gives you a metric other than size to evaluate community health. One prominent sports community on Lemmy.world recently became the largest for its topic in the most recent user-signup wave while effectively being unmoderated. It overtook an older, more established, and better run community on another instance and it’s too late for accurate size-metrics to help anyone understand the difference between these communities now. You have to look at mod activity to see that one mod team solicited community feedback on rules, enforced them fairly, set up raceday discussion threads, and had fruitful policy discussions and calm disagreements with subscribers. The other was absent for days at a time, ignored mentions, didn’t set up rules, ignored conflicts between users, the showed up to remove posts trying to jumpstart policy discussions, and basically was AWOL until some users of the community petitioned the admins to take over the community. It’s probably going to head in a better direction now that there are finally more mods on board, but its dominant growth phase occured while an absent mod was squatting it and doing nothing much of use, the only thing that mattered was being on lemmy.world with misleading subscriber counts and that was enough to become what is now genuinely the biggest community for its topic.

As the threadiverse overall, I think community discovery within Lemmy just has to be a lot better. I’m not sure what that looks like in its entirety, but I’m confident that a critical piece of the experience is comparable activity metrics for local and remote communities being prominent in Lemmy’s native community browser.

I blame unfederated subscriber counts. If you look up any community from an account on lemmy.world and there is a local version and a remote version… the local version LOOKS bigger when it’s about half the size because the remote version only shows subscribers from lemmy.world whereas the local version shows subs fediverse-wide.

If sub counts were apples to apples for remote and local communities, people would much more frequently sub to the bigger remote comminity. But lemmy.world is so big, that when people are subbing locally because they’re confused about which is bigger… the lemmy.world community actually becomes bigger very quickly. So it’s winning the community scaling races consistently on pure confusion. The resulting community centralization is not all that healthy and they often overtake better run and more established communities for no meaningful reason.