Showing signs of stress already, takes too long for posting comments, searches across federated instances won't always show up, etc.

A federated social network is good in theory and ideal to achieve, but when you actually go and implement the designs and code, it gets too messy and complicated too quickly. On top of that, the lemmy guys also tried to create a generic standard to achieve federation with mastodon instances too! That I think was a bit too much than they could chew. They should have made lemmy robust first and tried including others.