I have not reached out to ST.website, and anyway it seems besides the point b/c as of now they have caught up. And since all 3 of these instances were having the same issue at the same time, I would guess that it is just more of this same style of rate-limiting issues that we hear across many other instances. I did a bit digging and I see this pinned comment describing the issue occuring 5 months ago: https://startrek.website/post/10430719/9550923. The admins are aware, but until Lemmy.World updates to 0.19.6, what can they do about it really? But here at least you can see the answer directly from an admin about exactly this style of issue.

Yes Discuss.Online is very (hehe... may I say "blazingly"?:-P) fast - I first moved to it when ST.website was being pokey slow (~10 months ago) and I have enjoyed very much how smooth the experience is on it. Though it does federate with hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the "just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don't you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don't you share YOUR references hrm, no I've never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?". As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that "normies" as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.

ST.website at least defederated from hexbear, though discuss.online has not. I briefly considered mander.xyz cause that source of content seems amazing, but it defederates from almost nothing at all - not even lemmygrad.ml (there are only 2 entries in its block list: threads.net and burggit.moe - even exploding heads isn't listed there, wtf!?!?) Edit: though someone could eke out quite the existence there just browsing Local - that experience wouldn't offer any "news" and especially "politics", so that could be a strong plus for someone, but then you could switch between Global vs. Local at the press of a button, to expand or narrow one's preferred scope of input. Then again, it seems hyperfocused on the STEM fields, with very little of e.g. liberal arts (though not none, e.g. !natural_process_art@mander.xyz and !gan_art@mander.xyz, and yet those are not highly active).

Programming.dev has more than merely federation issues too. I don't know if they've modified their codebase or what, but e.g. community names containing spaces - or perhaps it was underscores - are having trouble as well.

And yes I know you made the meme, I was reminding you that I'm not making this up - there are definitely federation issues going on! Perhaps not right this very second (or maybe, from somewhere, I dunno?), but over the past year this intermittent issue has persisted, to varying degrees based in part on proximity and network latency between it vs. Lemmy.World, and perhaps on hardware and in particular network connection services of each instance.

Oh, and maybe this is where we were disconnecting: if you were talking "top 20", and I was mentioning ST.website and Discuss.Online and PieFed.social and programming.dev and aussie.zone, then (1) it still shows how it isn't PieFed.social's "fault", b/c this delay with Lemmy.World content happens to MANY (most?) small instances, but (2) for a recommendation to give to people, e.g. those still on Reddit, then yeah, I don't know of something better than lemm.ee. I was suggesting to think about adding lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list in spite of it not being in the top 20, in case some people might bend more towards wanting to avoid trolling behavior - tbf, this could be more of a recommendation for people on Mastodon than Reddit, at which point perhaps Mbin is a better fit anyway? Though at least some of those, like sopuli.xyz and lemmy.ca, do defederate from hexbear.net even if not from lemmy.ml, which is something.