mastodon struggled with scaling in the beginning, everytime elon strung more than four syllables together. a lot of admins there didn't know what the spikes would do - this is not a criticism, i would have had no idea either - and most new users piled into one or two big instances, as is happening here.

the more tech-savvy of the initial waves migrated to smaller instances, the instance admins figured out where the pain points were, and i think there were changes to mastodon itself. i expect all of these are coming for lemmy, and it's going to be lumpy here for a while just as it was in masto.

having lived through that, i came into a smaller instance here immediately. federation issues here are a bit gnarlier than on masto, but i trust that also will be sorted.