Yeah, it's been broken for 4 days now.

It wasn't a criticism, I was commiserating. I personally am shitposting to other local communities.

Yeah, I'm a grad student with limited funds and I contributed to the server when I joined last summer. I don't really want to sacrifice this account, but if we can't interact with anyone else, it kind of defeats the purpose of being federated.

So I take it they never responded to your volunteer application?

In the past, there's been no catch up. Repost anything you want to be seen.

It is, rebooting a service/system/server or other tinkering by the instance admins has let at least one instance come back. But the bug comes back so it's not a real solution. The instances that don't show the problem might still have it but also have a solution watching to reset when needed.

I asked in #helpdesk on irc and they said to mail membership@sdf.org, which I did earlier this morning.

If I hear back I'll update the thread.

Oh damn, I didn't even notice that.
It seems the browser cache is saving me for now:

Edit: Hmmm, interesting. The buttons are there, but they only show up briefly after refreshing.

Edit 2: The page with icons returns

HTTP/2 404 
server: nginx
date: Sat, 13 Jan 2024 22:31:19 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-powered-by: Express
content-security-policy: default-src 'self'; manifest-src *; connect-src *; img-src * data: blob:; script-src 'self' 'nonce-a11a1859d413a6f8d1a7e96994bb6ccb'; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'; form-action 'self'; base-uri 'self'; frame-src *; media-src * data:
cache-control: public, max-age=60
etag: W/"14aa8-/2gJKxI2YSvDtADj1ANGgw9bOSs"
content-encoding: gzip
X-Firefox-Spdy: h2  

https://lemmy.sdf.org/static/9aa19d8b/assets/symbols.svg
for comparison:
https://lemmy.ml/static/9aa19d8b/assets/symbols.svg

It isn't empty if you check the page source, there's SVG icons.
Example:

If I remember rightly, the backend update takes a long time as the database needs to do a particularly slow schema update. https://old.lemmy.sdf.org seems to still be ok.

It’s frustrating and it makes me sad and disappointed to see the SDF so unresponsive to pretty much all issues (even those raised on the system itself, about the system).

That being said, I actually feel like it makes me do the opposite of waste time, because it’s virtually impossible for me to get sucked into an upsetting interaction here that has no broader consequence beyond making me feel bad.

That's a shame. Problems like this is why lemmy won't go very far imo. Expecting a random person on the internet to go through the signup process which involves applying for an account on some instances is wishful thinking, them understanding what federation is and how it works is very optimistic, but then braking the federation with no warning and no action plan for fixing it is just shooting yourself in the foot.

Do you know another instance that is admined similarly? I have accounts on a few servers but I think they have all been involved in various defederation drama in the past.

Edit: I found this, haven't looked it over yet but hoping to find an alternative to put in my stable of lemmy logins