So, as per images below, when you search for an Australian community associated with lemmy, lemmy.world is more likely to come up than Aussie Zone in all i've tried, bar Melbourne our most active community.
My question: Is this a problem we should consider intentional action to correct? And if so what could we do?
anecdotally I've simply been noticing less from this instance in my consolidated feed for some time and have unintentionally been elsewhere. I don't thinks much to it other algorithms doing algorithm things but yeah it's definitly a nice quiet corner of the internet
I think there is still a 7 day delay between az and lw and this has a big affect of the number of people that engage with az.
Basically if I post something on az, and then someone from lw comments on it, then their comment wont federate for 7 days. If I reply to them it will take another 7 days to reach them. It's kind of like communicating with far off satellites or spacecraft in space without having to send anything into space.
Yeah, we're aware of that issue. It's a limitation with the Lemmy software itself. It only synchronises one thing (comment/vote/post etc) at a time. Confirms it federated and then the next thing. Due to the physical distance between us in Australia and lemmy.world in Finland, each thing takes ~.25 seconds to federate. As there are more things to federate than there is minutes in the day, there is a backlog.
Out friends over the Tasman got around the problem by spinning up a proxy server in Finland just to grab batches of lemmy.world content and bulk transfer it to NZ. We've been invited to share the code that enables that process, but it requires us setting up our own extra host in Finland. We haven't allotted the time and funds to do that - mostly as it's a problem that is expected to correct itself in an upcoming version of the Lemmy backend software.
To be honest, I kind of like this. I get really annoyed by Americans ignoring all the "Australia" and "Aussie" everywhere and then explaining something exclusive to America to us like we're idiots. There's not as much of that over here as there was on Reddit, but I still see it happen sometimes. It's also been my experience that a decent portion of the people on LW are "minimum effort" people, they put the minimum amount of effort possible into choosing their Lemmy instance, and they also put the minimum amount of effort possible into everything else they do. I haven't had many issues with people on other instances amerisplaining things at me, it's mostly just people on LW.
It's kind of nice to put them all into a mandatory week long timeout before we have to deal with them. In the meantime, they can still see and read comments from other LW users, so they can have their little arguments about how great America is in the peace and comfort of their naughty corner. Then a week later, the conversation is usually dead and whatever garbage they wanted to spruke about America is completely irrelevant (even though it didn't have much relevancy to begin with....)
I'd almost be in favour of artificially kneecapping it so we can keep the American naughty corner forever, but this delay is affecting my meme supply and my all page is feeling quite bare