This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
Content loads just as fast on small subs as on large subs. Not so for instances. I think centralization is inevitable unless federated data transfer gets faster.
It usually is federated quickly within Lemmy itself. I can’t speak for kbin but in my experience on SJW, I typically get all the content from remote instances in real time.
I know there are some technical issues with the scaling of federation though, but hopefully that can be improved on.
Here is a dashboard of synchronisation time between the most popular instances: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/cdfzs0dwal3pca/federation-health-time-behind?orgId=1&var-instance=All&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.blahaj.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.ml&var-remote_instance=lemmy.nz&var-remote_instance=reddthat.com&var-remote_instance=sh.itjust.works&var-remote_instance=slrpnk.net&var-remote_software=All&from=now-12h&to=now
As you can see, the only three instances synchronizing in more than 5 minutes are
- reddthat, based in Australia
- lemmy.nz, in New Zealand
- aussie.zone, Australia too
- feddit.ch, closing at the end of the month
For the 3 first instances, this is due to lag and centralization of communities on LW. Moving communities away from LW would actually help solving that issue (in parallel, Reddthat is planning to open an EU server to reduce the lag)
Are these all lemmy clients?
Lemmy instances. The graph shows how long it takes for content to go from one instance to another, which is a few minutes at most
Gotcha. Makes me wish I had the technical know how to spin up my own instance. Those really are like subreddits then.
To be fair, for most people it is better to just use a another instance. Instance maintenance can take quite some time
