With forewarning about a huge influx of users, you know Lemmy.ml will go down. Even if people go to https://join-lemmy.org/instances and disperse among the great instances there, the servers will go down.
Ruqqus had this issue too. Every time there was a mass exodus from Reddit, Ruqqus would go down, and hardly reap the rewards.
Even if it’s not sustainable, just for one month, I’d like to see Lemmy.ml drastically boost their server power. If we can raise money as a community, what kind of server could we get for 100$? 500$? 1,000$?
Thought on this a bit more, and I’m thinking encouraging users not to silo (and make it easy to discover instances and new communities) will probably be the best bet for scaling the network long-term.
“Smart” rate limiting of new accounts and activity per-instance might help with this organically. If a user is told that the instance they’re posting on is too active to create a new post, or too active to accept new users, and then is given alternatives, they might not outright leave.
That might work, is there some third party email app that could capture their email and let them know when registrations are open again? I know of some corporate/not privacy respecting ones such as https://kickofflabs.com/campaign-types/waitlist/ but presumably there’s a way to do that with some on-site tools?
If the instance in question has email support, I don’t see why the instance couldn’t notify them directly - but I think providing alternative instances first (with the option to get notified if this instance opens up) would be more reasonable
The idea would be to retain the ability to collect email addresses, beyond the point that the main app can’t keep up. So you’d want something lightweight just for capturing the emails.