Hello from across the fediverse!
If you've contributed to the conversation in discussions in this community you may have noticed you weren't getting a lot of interaction (at least from outside your instance: lemmy.world). There are a couple of reasons for this and I will unpin this post when the issues are resolved.
The problem is basically that lemmy.world is sending too many activities for aussie.zone to keep up with, this is mostly due to the latency going from Europe to Sydney. There are some features being developed for Lemmy to hopefully fix this issue (expected in 0.19.5). The delay currently means that activities are taking around 7 days to reach aussie.zone.
The admins of aussie.zone do a great job keeping the instance going as a place for us to gather and discuss Australia and related issues so please do not direct any criticism at them over this. To be able to properly interact with our community I would recommend creating an account on another instance for the time being (as far as I know lemmy.world is the only problematic one).
If you're interested there is currently a discussion ongoing in !meta@aussie.zone (link for aussie.zone users) covering this.
Basically, jobs are processed in a serial fashion, and each job involves several steps of back and forth communication between the two instances to complete. Add in around the globe latency, and new jobs arrive faster than old jobs can be cleared out of the queue.
That is a terrible design for a global platform lol
Apparently delays over 7 days just result in the entire job being thrown in the bin too, so that actually means a lot of things just aren't federating here at all....
And tbf I don't think the Lemmy Devs anticipated thousands of people joining at the same time, so that doesn't help
Also there isn't meant to be a huge instance like world, the point of federation Is to avoid this, but users always tend to join big instances on federated services like lemmt and matrix and such
I can kind of understand that to be honest. I refused to sign up to Aussie zone for a while because I thought an Aussie instance would be too niche to attract enough members to remain viable and would collapse after a few months. Even once I realised there was probably enough activity for it's admins to want to keep it, I stayed on shitjustworks.
I knew that I didn't want to join any of the big instances because I thought they'd probably be hugged to death, so my first account was on beehive. But their email verifications and strict sign up requirements were confusing so I lived on shitjustworks for a while