General Discussion

Your concerns are definitely valid, but just a reminder that majority if not all of the instances are volunteer-ran!

There may be donations, but I would hazard a guess that no one is "on salary" to maintain, update, and debug their servers let alone handle emergencies from the surge of users, activities, and shutdowns.

Also, quite a few instances are run by folks who are not sysadmins or developers, and are learning (or forced to) all the necessary skills to do these tasks that weren't easy to begin with.

Things will definitely get better in due time, especially if all the good folks hosting instances continue doing so. There's been a lot of optimisation and collaboration to make Lemmy more performant, so significant improvements will be showing up in the near future!