The any publicity is good publicity mindset really is gone after you are already a household name. Twitter was already in the news daily, Journalism was replaced with 300 “Celebrity/politician tweeted ______”, and half the time all research and studies being replaced with 10 random tweets. “People are outraged about X, here’s 10 tweets from random people to prove it”.

I mean short and long term there’s pros and cons to that. however there’s a reason why that started to fall appart with e-mail. In short if it gets popular, than hosting servers with no throttling or post limits means spammers are going to go crazy, and rather than play the never ending unwinnable whack a mole game as bad actors create thousands of instances a day, hosts of any instances worth targetting will have to do a “instances are assumed malicious until proven benign”, (IE a whitelist method)

In short, simply lemmy has been slowly growing by tiny amounts for a year… but it hasn’t gotten nearly ready for major growth. Then reddit of course did the huge things causing lemmy to grow at 10x it’s normal predicted amount, and because it’s especially people from reddit, many of which don’t really understand federation yet. They assumed joining the main instance is the way to do it. (rather than understanding that almost all instances can communicate with eachother).

In short it’s a perfect storm for excessive growth on too small of a segment. on a network that wasn’t prepared for the sudden increase in demand.