There is no 'main' website. It's all connected. People just started joining that because it's big and overloaded it, and now it's having federation and stability issues.
This needs to be integrated into Lemmy asap; really hurts discoverability and makes comms look way smaller than they are to new users.
This, instance migration, and assigning new users to good general instances like lemm.ee or vlemmy.net upon registration (letting them change it of course) so they don't need to know about instances would go a long way to being user friendly.
Instance migration, lemmyverse.net functionality in lemmy, and assigning new users to a good random instance upon registration (and letting them change it of course) so they don't need to know about instances, are the three most important features lemmy needs rn imo
Isn't that the whole point though? Not relying on a single entity by spreading out, but still being connected?
Fragmentation would be fixed by just integrating lemmyverse.net's functionality into lemmy itself (like in this github issue), allowing users to see the true user count/activity of comms and incentivise them to join the most popular one.
Needs to be done asap imo; comm discoverability is not good right now and is probably the single biggest hurdle for new users
That's another thing. People need to stop recommending the massive servers and recommend smaller ones like vlemmy.net, lemmy.one or lemm.ee instead, at lest until lemmy'soptimized for user counts of this scale. Those servers have also been upgraded for the surge of users after all, and everything's connected anyway.
In fact, I think lemmy clients should go as far as to assign new users randomly to good general servers like these upon registration so they don't even have to know about instances; would make the onboarding much better
This seriously needs to implemented in lemmy already. Not being able to see the true member count/activity of all communities is a massive blow to discoverability and very anti-ux, and likely the biggest hurdle for newcomers.
It's only gonna get worse lol; they're removing old.reddit next, going after nsfw and increasing ads.
The ux is already better here within the last few weeks with clients like Memmy and Connect; Boost and Sync are gonna be awesome when they're out in a few weeks
Aside from what Coelacanth said, those instances are no more likely to shut down than lemmy.world (I can't recall a Lemmy instance that's not for personal use ever shutting down); they've functioned just fine for years and have even been upgraded for the surge of users too
Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
I just say lemmy comm, or just comm