late May… what I saw was lemmy.ml turned off new user signup, community creation, and load-shed by letting the server error out.

now lemmy.world is bigger in content and activity but the drastic blocking of incoming links to comments is in place.

I think the number of active users has less to do with the performance problems than the amount of data in the database. The heavy use of JOIN and custom account-specific filters. An account with a large block list and a huge list of subscribed communities likely performs wildly different when listings posts than a non-logged in user.