I’ve gone and made accounts of a handful of Lemmy instances, all of them larger, more popular ones.
… and I can’t access any of them directly today, likely due to the influx of users from Reddit.
Programming.dev is alive and well though.
I don’t think the scale of what is happening at lemmy.world resembles what is happening on programming.dev. lemmy.world has 82k users. programming.dev has 4.4k. Hopefully more general instances are created, because it seems like people general instances as opposed instances such as mander.xyz and programming.dev. The beauty of decentralization is not being used to its full potential atm, I think.
Maybe I was misunderstood: I mean right now programming.dev seems to have scale issues as well. I’m totally for decentralization, but I think decentralization should happen on a per-topic/community level, so that we don’t have gazillion /c/programming communities spread across multiple instances (at least until there is a good solution for somehow grouping communities across instances). And I think one instance should handle at least a few thousand maybe > 100k at least somehow active users (lemmy isn’t a p2p network after all…), which I think should be possible right now with a beefy server.