There are many lemmy instances in the world, but currently most people are using lemmy.world. This is why everything has gotten so slow.
You don’t have to delete your lemmy.world account, but check out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map it’s a geo-based map of lemmy instances – explore stuff nearest you, pick one, sign up, search , subscribe and begin interacting with your favorite communities. It’s easy, free and it will be faster. Try it!
The dev, Ruud (User Profile), who runs Lemmy.world also runs another Fediverse instance, Mastodon.world. If you go to Mastodon.World you can see their blog posts which talks about their infrastructure and Expenses.
https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
The VPS package they’re hosted on runs for almost $600 a month with a massive CPU, memory, and storage. I suspect now the expenses are increasing due to the massive influx of users. Now imagine Reddit’s costs serving over a billion people across the planet - Multi-million dollar contracts between Reddits and other corporations, tens of thousands of full-time salary jobs of engineers and devs, etc.
Running a Lemmy instance on an old laptop is extremely trivial. But serving Lemmy to tens of thousands of users is expensive and difficult. Lemmy will improve over time and hopefully we’ll see load balancing and horizontal scaling in the future. I’d love to see additional containers get spun up during large spikes of capacity.