The majority of these communities were cleaned up by @[email protected] tonight but if you spot any more you can DM him or also raise the issue on the Matrix chat that we have here.
We're also working on implementing rate-limiting on our instance so these changes should make sh.itjust.works much less attractive to spammers.
Keep in mind that these are the early days of Lemmy and the admin is donating time and resources to get this community going. Getting the configs published publicly so that people can make informed choices about which instance they wish to use would certainly be nice, but comparing this to Reddit is a bit far-fetched. TheDude is trying to sustain the community as best as he can, whereas Reddit has been suffocating the community in exchange for corporate profits.
You might want to clear your site data
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/clear-cookies-and-site-data-firefox
A lot of bots were spamming the instance which was causing an IO bottleneck, and thus timeout issues. We're looking into solutions to limit their impact, such as rate-limiting users. We're trying to do it in such a way that it doesn't impact regular users which is why it's taking a bit longer.