I don’t think its too bad, but it probably depends a lot on a lot of factors.

Since I first started my hardware got a lot stronger, and nextcloud, php, and mariadb have all improved and so my experience has gotten pretty decent.

Remember though, there’s a ton of biases here, so I could be wrong…

My experiences with Nextcloud have been on another level in general. Really positive. I use it for a lot of things including notes, and its been really solid.

Nextcloud Notes has become my go-to (Oh look, SJ is advocating for Nextcloud again! How original!)

I’m cheap.

So far, Conduit is the only answer for me, since I don’t own any quantum supercomputers.

I think it depends a lot on the federated service.

For mastodon, you follow individual users, so if there’s a million users or ten million or a hundred million, their instances will only be contacting other intances they’re federating with so it’s quite scalable.

For Lemmy, you follow communities, so every server pulls all the posts and comments the common community. This means that for an instance like lemmy.world hosting lots of different big communities, every new server hammers the one central instance.

A strategy for improving the situation I think would be to spread the load. Instead of everyone piling into megacommunities, if people spread out into smaller more tight knit communities over many different instances. Of course, this isn’t really compatible with the purpose of having communities like that.

It does seem to suggest that ActivityPub isn’t necessarily the most appropriate protocol for this purpose, even though it’s what was used because it’s the de facto standard on the fediverse.

The establishment wants to:

• Get rid of government it does not control
• Grow the government it controls
• Remove any class hierarchies it doesn’t control
• Replace them with hierarchies it does control
• Remove anyone who got power outside of means they directly control
• Increase the classes of people whose power relies on means they directly control

This can be done by lying to both the left and the right, because that’s why they have rooms full of the smartest people on earth crafting narrative framing to let them do the above while pretending they’re doing something else, and using overwhelming power to implement their schemes.

You might not like it, but COVID showed exactly what everyone’s actual attitudes were. Apparently the left loves bureaucrats, the biggest most authoritarian governments in the history of the world paid for by selling out future generations, and multinational drug companies. Swing and a miss.

Now don’t get me wrong, the right is fucked too. Their narrative was the establishment narrative very recently, and even now as views start to change I can already see it that some of the old right-wing establishment types think their “side” is getting a toehold and they stand up and start trying to do the exact same thing just using their narratives. After 9/11 we got to see the exact same bullshit but instead of going after a virus it was going after “terrorism”.

Isn’t it funny that no matter which “side” you choose, they want to control your life more and spend more money on Government that magically seems to find it into the pockets of the ultra-rich buddies of whoever that part of the establishment happens to be?

Of course, there’s an anti-establishment left and an anti-establishment right, and while they might not agree on what the final destination might be, there’s a lot of common ground to be found as well (and common attacks from the mass establishment and their pawns on both sides of the aisle)

Lemmy started off as much more left-wing, to the extent that it had a hard-coded slur filter that only recently was made something configurable. The choice of .ml has been proposed as being chosen because it represents “Marxist Leninist” (and I don’t know if that’s true or not), but many of the original instances were highly censored.

That being said, I’ve been both left and right and presently I’m more right wing, and a lot of the time I write up some big screed in response to something dumb or evil and then just hit “close tab” because when I’m on someone else’s instance I want to be a good houseguest and not cause trouble.

Such people have been surrounded by an echo chamber for years and years, they never hear any viewpoints other than what the establishment feeds them, and I don’t really want to waste my time fighting against the propaganda power of multiple nation-state coalitions.

(I did make the mistake of accidentally saying what I thought a while back, and now I’ve got a bunch of smug idiots on my case)

I figure it’s only a matter of time until the rest of the fediverse starts to arrive (I’ve heard through the grapevine some other instances considering starting up their own lemmy instances), and then things will be a lot more balanced.

• Lemmy
• Searx
• Matrix
• Xmpp
• Soapbox
• Lotide
• Peertube
• Nextcloud
• Nostr
• Wordpress
• Plex (sorta borderline of this counts)
• Invidious
• Pfsense

Running on a total of 5 fanless commercial grade sign PCs. That’s why the motto of my websites is “this site runs of parts scavenged from a roadside sign”

1x core 2 duo running Lemmy

2x atom d2550s running xmpp, matrix, lotide, searx, nostr, and invidious

2x core i5 4000 series running everything else

I try to run bare metal so I can stick my fingers into things.