Jerboa

I mean, it could be the app, but I believe it is potentially the instance because an instance with a lot of users is having to feed a whole lot of users at once. Which is much more resource intensive than the way the fediverse was designed to work by sharing with multiple instances to share the load of users constantly scrolling at the same time.

Imagine you were tasked with handing out a thousand hotdogs at a sporting event. You could do it yourself, but you are going to get overwhelmed very quickly and the line is only going to keep building up. Then imagine you have a hotdog delivery network where there are still 1000 hotdogs to be delivered, but you can share the load by having other vendors take 50 hotdogs each and giving them out at their station. The people get their hotdogs faster as they aren't all waiting on just you and you aren't overwhelmed being the hotdog overlord.

I personally believe that users need to start spreading out to new instances so we don't overload the most popular instances. Lemmy was not designed to work like reddit where there is only one hotdog overlord. Lemmy is better built to be used at scale with much smaller vendors. Another neat feature of this concept is that the fediverse can't be shutdown unless everyone stops selling hotdogs. If one goes down, everything still works fine, you just don't have whatever that particular instance was giving away. Unlike reddit where if there is a problem, the whole site is down and nobody gets any hotdogs.