World was already the biggest by far when I first started lurking back in July, and it’s just getting more dominant. Before, there was quite some diversity in the distribution of generic communities, but nowadays the vast majority of posts that reach the top are from over there.

I really can’t see any specific virtue that it has; uptime is not the best (or so I’ve heard), the moderation is quite lacking (which is demonstrated by the fact that Beehaw defederated them), they make some unpopular moderation choices (like blocking !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com), and overall the atmosphere is a lot less… nice than those of smaller instances.

I also feel like it goes against the idea of the Fediverse that one instance has control over most of the platform. Especially on Lemmy, where communities mean that building community within an instance makes so much more sense than elsewhere, and upvotes are federated near perfectly regardless the size of your instance, decentralisation makes a lot of sense. It really just doesn’t make sense to me that Lemmy World is where people are going.

  • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
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    At the time, LW was among the only ones that could handle the influx of registrations.

    So naturally, it became the default one, as people would want to get on the biggest one, similar to a way the biggest Mastodon instance is very prevalent.

    People were also afraid their All feed won’t be as full if they were not on LW.

    Nowadays I think the repartition is a bit better, and most of the top communities have at least an equivalent out of LW.

    • illi@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I was on LW at first but made a switch specifically because the instancencouldn’t handle the influx

      • Jay@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        There was also a user that was booted for sublemmy camping (literally trying to grab thousands of sub names) that was constantly ddosing the site, and doing everything they could to mess things up for others.

          • Jay@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Probably still around under a different name or over on hexbear with all the other like-minded individuals.

              • Jay@lemmy.ca
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                I never said they had anything to do with it, only that may be where he went. (assuming he’s not still here.) The crap he was posting was very similar to what they were spamming.

                • ǟռȶɨӄ 👾@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Ok just want to make it clear that we never suspected Hexbear to be involved. This started before we defederated with them.

        • ǟռȶɨӄ 👾@lemmy.world
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          *allegedly

          We are not sure who was behind the ddos. It could have been that guy or it could have been users from exploding-heads.com because we defederated with them.

          Or it could just as well have been an admins from another instance that didn’t like LW was the biggest instance.

          The only thing that was sure was that they knew very well how Lemmy worked and which actions caused the heaviest load on the server.

      • ǟռȶɨӄ 👾@lemmy.world
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        We couldn’t handle the ddos at times, the influx was never the problem. Every time that did become a problem we upgraded the hardware.

    • iso@lemy.lol
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      TBH they couldn’t handled the traffic at the beginning because Lemmy wasn’t stable as is now, but I believe they tried their best. Also I can’t say for all of them but their admins are reliable, trustworthy people.

    • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
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      Yeah, I guess people have a reflex to always go wherever is the biggest (which doesn’t really make sense in the Fediverse).

      Mastodon is different, though. Mastodon.social is the default instance and is heavily suggested by the company, while join-lemmy.org lists instances randomly by default. There must be something that inclined users to join it, considering that it gained enough momentum to make up more than half of Lemmy users (not counting alien.top).

  • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Since nobody mentioned it, I will. It has a cool, short and easy to remember name.

    Curb appeal and convenience are extremely powerful drivers of human behavior. Moreso than time-consuming, complex, rational processing in a world of nearly infinite options.

  • raptir@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    I think there are two big reasons…

    • During the big Reddit exodus, a lot of people were recommending lemmy.world.
    • It’s a general purpose instance. People tend to flock to those rather than more specific topical instances.
  • TeaHands@lemmy.world
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    I joined .world when there were only about 100 of us (was trying to find a nice small server to settle on, so much for that!), and rolled up my sleeves and went full-time tech support for like 2 weeks to help with the influx. So from that pov:

    • When the Reddit exodus started (slightly earlier than people had anticipated), .world was one of the only instances that didn’t require a proper application to join.
    • There was a bug where acceptance emails weren’t being delivered to Gmail addresses (probably some others too but for obvious reasons Gmail was noticed first). That meant people waiting for their applications to be accepted on other servers didn’t realise they had been. As well as this some people were just impatient waiting in general so gave up on their original instance choice and joined .world instead.
    • Other instances also started to close registrations completely due to not being able to handle the scaling. World wasn’t handling it great but Ruud specifically announced he wouldn’t be closing signups, which is one of the reasons it became the default recommendation while everything was on fire.
    • There was a thread tracking how quickly we were growing, I remember us celebrating 1000 users and then a couple weeks later 100,000! And that was kind of exciting so I can’t blame people for wanting to be part of it.

    The best part is, I was the one who reported the Gmail thing to Ruud after seeing the admins of another instance had figured out a fix. I remember saying it was good we’d noticed it now, before the influx “next week” (ie Reddit’s scheduled meltdown). Turned out, he had no idea that was about to happen at all and the timing of setting up .world was just a total coincidence! 😆

    Edit: This was only like six months ago and recounting the tale to all you whippersnappers is making me feel like an old grandma telling tales of the war.

    • isildun@sh.itjust.works
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      You say “only” 6 months ago but it’s surprising to me just how quickly this time has passed.

      I was a Reddit every day user pre-Lemmy. I happened to get linked to something there yesterday and saw all my sub’s “last visited” dates at 6 months. It’s crazy how easy it was to go cold turkey and I haven’t seen a need to go back.

      • TeaHands@lemmy.world
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        Same, I follow a search result there sometimes but essentially just logged out there, signed up here, and that was that. The Reddit Days seem like another lifetime now.

    • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
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      Edit: This was only like six months ago and recounting the tale to all you whippersnappers is making me feel like an old grandma telling tales of the war.

      Exactly my feeling

  • samus12345@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I joined because it didn’t require jumping through any hoops to join and was featured prominently on the join-lemmy website.

    • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
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      From https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (regarding reasons for defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works)

      the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;

      • Z4rK@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I wouldn’t use Beehaw as the standard, they are way too strict on their moderation in many’s opinion.

        • mifan@feddit.dk
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          This is really what’s is beginning to bother me. I came from Reddit with the fuck-spez-wave searching for an alternative, and Lemmy somehow sounded interesting and a new way of doing things.

          I can live with the lag of content, that will come, but more and more it looks like every server is their own little community with whatever weirdnesses they have, and each one has a bunch of moderators, most good, some bad, but all doing what they think is best.

          When you’re just a mainstream user looking for content and debate, and take no interest in server drama, defederations and whatever, it’s all just unwanted noise and irritating.

          • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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            And if you’re not following server news, even if you know the very basics of federation, it’s easy to miss defederations and subsequently never know you’re not seeing content you wanted to see.

            Personally, I’m very interested in seeing a true representation of top posts. I’ll need a client that can let me login to multiple instances or a server that’s never the federated from anybody. One risk here is I could recommend Lemmy to someone, they could register on a different instance, and assume I like content I in fact don’t.

            Tip: just learned I can see federated and blocked instances at /instances (e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/instances ).

          • Z4rK@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I understand the frustration, but I do believe this is a strength of Lemmy. Small; individual communities is what gives incentive to stay independent, and if you just want the broader content, that’s exactly where and why large instances like Lemmy World is also beneficial.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          Too strict and their users provoke outside users on purpose.

          Please disregard, was mixing up Beehaw and Hexbear

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        Then again you’re talking about Beehaw, their users react so badly to anyone telling them they might be wrong that it’s not surprising their mods need to spend a disproportionate amount of time taking action against other users.

        They defederated from my instance (after refederating) after their users raided the two management communities and were told to fuck off and then played victims in the defederation post, I would take whatever they say with a huge grain of salt.

        Forget that, was thinking about Hexbear!

        • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
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          I dunno though. Most trolls and bad actors that I have seen around here have indeed been from sh.itjust.works and Lemmy World.

          Edit: Ah, that explains it. Beehaw is such a chill place, I could never imagine them doing such things.