That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world

https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=startrek.website&var-remote_instance=lemmy.world&from=now-32d&to=now

This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.

https://lemmy.world/c/technology

https://startrek.website/c/technology@lemmy.world

If a person there didn’t know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn’t have as much activity as it actually does.

Thanks for the information!

I’m not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I’m not sure if they can easily show that information either.

I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…

The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.

It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.

Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.

There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.

One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.

ZoomIt - Sysinternals at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/zoomit

That small free application will notably allow you to press a key combination to “zoom in and out” on your screen and “draw” on your screen with your mouse. When presenting something using an external monitor, you can use that tool to draw attention to specific things or zoom in on tiny details when people are having issues seeing something. The link also show a small preview of what the application does.

If you want to see what various license plates look like from all of North America (as well as what they looked like in the past), there is a website that with a short URL. Strangely enough, the website never gone to https. The link is http://www.15q.net/

MiXplorer - https://mixplorer.com/

A file explorer allowing for me to transfer files over the network. When Solid Explorer suddenly didn’t seem to want to do network transfers anymore (likely because Windows updated something), I waited for that app to update to fix the issue. It never did. I found that MiXplorer was a good alternative that transfers files over the network just fine and works nice and fast as well. The interface takes a bit to get used to (meaning it isn’t the same as Solid Explorer) but the app is certainly worth using. Importantly, I can transfer files over the network without issue again.

Notably, this app is free to download (from XDA) however the Google Play version is not free. The Google Play version (which supports development) is a one time paid fee.

Though others have said multiple states have laws against changing prices during the business day.

Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why Walmart doesn’t want to be open 24 hours a day…