They are literally going through the same pains as any other social media sites that start getting big. Every social media site wants to be "all-inclusive" until you have to start worrying about content moderation and liability. Shit gets intense.
As for the "downtime," they've done posts about it. They are being constantly DDOS'ed by someone (assuming another defederated instance owner). And given your annoyance of it, it sounds like the DDOS is working as intended. The instance admins have done a fantastic job so far and I intend to wait it out.
There's no excuse for fumbling along like this is new. Better-run sites know what's coming and stick close to their initial rules.
If your site hosts pornographic drawings and you don't have a crystal clear line on whether that includes Bart Simpson, you are a fucking idiot.
If your site involves politics and you don't have a crystal clear line on whether Nazis are welcome, you are a fucking idiot.
If your site welcomes leftist counterculture and you don't have a crystal clear line on whether that includes making guns, smoking pot, or copying text, you are a fucking idiot.
The DDOS is something I've gladly weathered, in light of the admins taking it as an opportunity to debug the codebase. But what they've posted in-between those updates is "yeah btw we banned another thing that wouldn't raise an eyebrow on 2015 reddit." I'm not sure I want to stick around with that even if service was flawless.
Yeah fuck those instance owners for not taking on legal risk! We don't pay them and they should pay for our legal fees out of respect for the content we generate (which is copywritten and could get the instance owner in legal trouble)!
Edit: typos. Also, to explain: I just want y'all to consider the folks who keep the instances running and the legal risk they take. Some instances don't want to take on the risk. It's not a left/right thing, it's a risk-assesment thing. Removing content that might get them in legal trouble doesn't mean that the instance is taking a political, ethical or moral stance on the topic. It's really weird to think otherwise. My point was that when the instance owners get a dmca takedown notice (doesn't really matter what country, doesn't really matter if theh own the rights to that content or not), they are faced with a choice: do nothing and get sued, possibly needing to shut down the free service as a result. Or, they can choose to remove the content.
Conversational forums like lemmy are still places where links to pirated content can exist. I know people just talk about pirated content and that it's moderated but hear me out: sometimes people get busy and fall behind. They could then end up with a lawsuit.
To avoid this, a reasonable policy might be to just avoid the topic altogether. But that doesn't make them right or left wing, it just makes them regular site admins without an unlimited amount of money or the desire to go off grid and on the run. Yeah, that's the worst case scenario, my point simply being "free service run for long time if rules prevent legal threats to the service's livelyhood" see: napster.
Some jurisdictions are relatively more permissive than others, so the legal risk is not uniform. There will be some user flows until the instance landscape has settled.
Yes, I've also made accounts on some other instances. Not made the jump to run my own yet, the code base is not yet sufficiently stable nor are the moderation tools yet there.
You seem to see drama where there is none. It's simply about finding a more suitable location. I could run an instance myself, but I don't trust myself to make it sustainable enough.