That’s not how federation works. You can still interact with lemmy.world and its users from another instance, but spreading out not only helps with lemmy.world’s load, but also the fediverse.

Almost definitely, it’s hard to imagine there’s a community on lemmy.world that not one of the 20k users have susbcribed to

Pretty much any of the top 5 instances already subscribe to each others communities. Definitely not missing out on lemm.ee either!

One can easily get around that by simply subscribing to more communities!

I agree, but it’s too late now. Even Sync defaults to the .world instance, and at this rate, they’ll only grow bigger.

You want to defederate from the largest Lemmy instance, the poster child, and the mascot of Lemmy? Good luck. They are Lemmy now.

probably it’s just not worth it attacking smaller instances? lemmy.world is such a juicy target given how big it is.

One good way would be HTTP response times from the API, since that is not something that would be cached by Cloudflare at the edge.

That’s a terrible justification. lemmy.world is using Hetzner, and not a CDN whereas lemmy.ca is using Cloudflare, which is a CDN. Pinging is a terrible benchmark for comparing server performance.