Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
While the other recommendation in the thread are good, I think they are hard to implement things that will take time.
A quick fix solution can be to add a button on join-lemmy which says something like ‘Confused on where to join? click to join a recommended instance’ that redirects to the sign-up of one of the recommended instances (there is already a list).
This will allow for load balancing and easier time for people to just come and join.
This will mean that the ‘most recommended’ instance will get absolutely hammered with new registrations though. Some randomisation should be necessary.
But not too random, since some instances ate brand new and there’s no guarantee they’ll stay up, which might put off new users looking for something stable.
Indeed, there is a balance somewhere and the community+devs will have to experiment a bit the comings weeks and months to find the sweet spot.