Comment by bayindirh
14 hours ago
You shall wait. It's a volunteer powered system and while the ops are silent and terse in their mails, they're nice people.
Their plate is already quite full and they operate a whole universe of services, so cut them some slack.
It's not an ordinary service which is exposed to internet trying to turn a profit. They run SDF, two Mastodon instances, a mail server, a Git server, trying to salvage/keep alive living computer museum (SDF Vintage Systems), etc. etc.
I tried signing up to their mastodon three times and just never received the email accepting me. It's a shame because I wanted to be part of their community
Unless things have changed recently (last year or so), the SDF Mastodon servers are really slow and terrible at federating. They even had an incident where the servers failed, everyone lost their posts and had to start over again. Downtime was terrible.
SDF welcomed everyone openly during the initial Mastodon waves, so it was all very Eternal September.
If you're joining to make a spare account to participate with SDF people, awesome! But if you want it as your identity for all of Fedi, I think that would be a bad experience. I ended up getting my own MastoHost account for a while and it was a vastly better experience, until I burned out on Fedi.
SDF is a super fun place to experiment with Gopher though. I absolutely recommend getting your own Gopherhole on SDF. It's like the old Geocities days but in ASCII. (And make sure you grab Lagrange as your GUI Gopher / Gemini client. I liked Phetch as my terminal Gopher client.)
The performance hit was due to database work they were doing on the instance. Now it's a lot faster. The latest announcement reads as follows:
Which one? There are two instances, one for members, and one for everyone.
I didn't know there were two, so probably the one for everyone. Maybe I should join and try the other one
I get that it's a volunteer system, but having donated for 2 years to help support their Lemmy instance, it's frustrating it's been down for 2 weeks without much of an update, just a hint "there's a good chance" it will come back. To me that seems lacking of transparency, not terse. How much disk space is it using? Maybe others in the community could help? How can they if they don't respond to emails? It was a nice thing while it lasted, but for federated social media, that kind of downtime hurts communities the most.
Their notification says they're out of disk for Lemmy. For my part, I sent them $50 for more.
I agree with you that the social downtime is bad. People just won't use the service.