I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn’t federating new posts.
But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.
I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I’ll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!
Likewise, it was feeling a little dry here today and I finally figured out the same thing you did. Being able to subscribe across many servers is wicked sick, and having an instance sitting “in front” of them the way we’re using it makes it slick as heck when those other instances are unavailable or spotty.
It would be great if the instance kept a pulse on how federation to other instances is going and showed a health check in the app sidebar and near instance names to temper user expectations.
That sounds like a great idea!