Hey, admin of lemm.ee here. I have no behind the scenes knowledge of what happened to vlemmy, but I have heard (in this thread and elsewhere) that some communities have been suddenly left without a home. I hope it’s OK for me to direct a message to such people here.
If you’re looking for a new home for your community, and don’t want to do it on lemmy.world for any reason, I would be happy to welcome you at lemm.ee! If you’re interested and want to know more about how lemm.ee is run, you can check out our administration and federation policy.
We recently upgraded our servers, so should be no problems in accepting some new users. In general, lemm.ee is not going anywhere - we have even already paid for some of our infrastructure up front for a year.
You can't just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @technology or @technology is going to get HOSED on the regular.
While it's true that the hosts of popular communities will get more traffic, it's actually not as bad as it first seems.
Every Lemmy instance with at least one subscriber in that popular community will act as a mirror. That means that users who are just reading posts and comments will not cause any additional load on the home-instance of the popular community, because they are consuming local copies of the posts and comments.
This will actually help scaling a lot, and is in fact exactly how many centralized platforms scale (by creating a bunch of read-only copies of content).
As long as we can distribute the Lemmy userbase between different instances (and avoid creating one or two centralized super-instances), we can take a lot of advantage of this mirroring and the scaling will be quite good!
In those cases, the action will need to propagate back to the home server (that's where the "hosts of popular communities will get more traffic" comes from), but keep in mind - people usually read at least one or two orders of magnitude more than they write.
Absolutely, but a user will only upvote a post once, while they will read it on every reload of their page. (By "read" I mean "fetch it from their local mirror")