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
    1381·
    11 months ago

    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.eeEnglish
      471·
      11 months ago

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

      • Jay@lemmy.caEnglish
        411·
        11 months 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.

        • TeaHands@lemmy.world
          10·
          11 months ago

          Oh wow yeah the “I’m going to destroy your server” guy. I wonder what happened to him.

          • Jay@lemmy.caEnglish
            55·
            11 months ago

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

              • Jay@lemmy.caEnglish
                42·
                11 months ago

                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.

                • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
                  4·
                  11 months ago

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

        • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
          5·
          11 months ago

          *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.

      • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
        7·
        11 months ago

        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
      30·
      11 months ago

      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
      13·
      11 months ago

      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).

      • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
        291·
        11 months ago

        Join-lemmy was different at the time. There were only a few instances listed, and most of them where either quite selective in their registration, completely closed, or open. LW was among the last ones.

        There was also the trend (and I did it as well) to tell Reddit users to “just go to LW, it’s like Reddit” to avoid having to confuse them with federation.

        • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
          6·
          11 months ago

          Back when i made this account, lemmy.ml was i think one of the only instances with an active user count in the triple digits, and sopuli had single digits

      • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
        12·
        11 months ago

        alien.top

        I never heard of that instance, it has over one milion users but zero communities, what kind of a instance is that??

  • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    97·
    11 months 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.idEnglish
    70·
    11 months 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
    591·
    11 months ago

    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.worksEnglish
      16·
      11 months ago

      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
        5·
        11 months ago

        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
      2·
      11 months ago

      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.worldEnglish
    55·
    11 months 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
      242·
      11 months ago

      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.worldEnglish
        517·
        11 months ago

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

        • mifan@feddit.dk
          123·
          11 months ago

          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
            6·
            11 months ago

            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.worldEnglish
            3·
            11 months 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
          97·
          11 months ago

          Too strict and their users provoke outside users on purpose.

          Please disregard, was mixing up Beehaw and Hexbear

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        236·
        11 months ago

        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
          115·
          11 months ago

          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.

            • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
              76·
              11 months ago

              Together, they make up a bit more less than 50% of active users, yet basically all far-right trolls are from there. You could say it is more difficult to moderate big instances, but if you have more users to moderate, you should also increase moderating capacity or close registrations.

              • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
                51·
                11 months ago

                I dont know why you’re getting down voted, as a moderator basically all the “death to brown people” comments I have to delete are from that shithole and lemm.ee.

              • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
                3·
                11 months ago

                We do not make up for 50% of the active users. Also we have plenty of moderators and admins, reports get handled pretty fast. It’s up to the community moderators first but if it takes too long one of the admins will step in.

                And we will never close registrations.

                • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
                  22·
                  11 months ago

                  We do not make up for 50% of the active users.

                  I remember it used to be higher, now it is approx. 41%. Only strengthens my point, though.

                  Alsof we have plenty of moderators and admins, reports get handled pretty fast.

                  I see different things. There are quite some trolls and abusive accounts that don’t seem to get removed.

                  And we will never close registrations.

                  I’m just saying the moderation has to improve in some way.

              • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
                31·
                11 months ago

                Together, they make up a bit more than 50% of active users, yet basically all far-right trolls are from there.

                That doesn’t say much about LW besides being the biggest instance - because trolls beeline towards larger audiences.

                but if you have more users to moderate, you should also increase moderating capacity or close registrations.

                Closing registrations might be the sensible approach here. Because the necessary moderation grows exponentially, and eventually too large of a mod/admin team becomes a problem on its own.

                • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
                  2·
                  11 months ago

                  The barrier of an application is enough to scare off most non-serious users. I used to favor open registration, but after making an account and participating on an instance with open registration vs closed, I found the closed registration shuts down a lot of bad actors and makes the instance a more pleasant community.

                  I’m not even advocating for rejecting any of the applications, just having questions to answer before joining seems to significantly cut down on the trolls.

          • inverted_deflector@startrek.website
            1·
            11 months ago

            Lol yeah I just migrated my account away from beehaw because they do plan on leaving eventually and it’s kind of jarring how much more low effort posting there is now.

            • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
              2·
              11 months ago

              If you don’t want to be called Nazis, then stop putting up with all the fascists in your instance. Pretending the problem doesn’t exist is definitely the mature stance to take when someone points out that your instance is harboring fascists.

        • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
          3·
          11 months ago

          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.

          I think that you’re partially right.

          The sort of online fight that Beehaw seeks to avoid depends on having at least one dumb fuck¹. Two cause it faster, but one is enough - because smart people have an easier time reaching agreement or realising that no agreement is possible.

          Both sides (LW+SJW and Beehaw) have their shares of smart posters and dumb fucks². The later are there for different reasons:

          • LW+SJW absorbed the bulk of the Reddit diaspora, and Reddit culture revolves around being a dumb fuck;
          • Beehaw doesn’t prevent you from being a dumb fuck, as long as you are not the one apparently starting the fight. Effectively sheltering dumb fucks who are really good at passive aggression, and who’ll have a meltdown once you say “what you said is incorrect, here’s why”, as they’ll interpret this as a personal attack.

          If you’re a smart user, you eventually learn how to handle the dumb fucks in your instance, in a way that is allowed there: chewing them out (within limits) or avoiding them like a plague. But those approaches break once you’re handling someone from the other side:

          • smart Beehaw user interacting with LW+SJW dumb fuck: “I feel like I’m always swallowing frogs with those users, as they say stupid shit and I don’t want to be rude.”
          • smart LW+SJW interacting with Beehaw dumb fuck: insert here your first paragraph. It’s why I think that you’re partially right.
          notes
          1. For the sake of this comment, I’m defining “dumb fuck” as someone who assumes too much, oversimplifies, disregards context, focuses too much on who says it instead of what is being said, lacks basic understanding of what other users say, or a mix of those.
          2. Note that, while it’s useful to pretend that “dumb fuck” and “smart user” are different categories of people, they are not - those are different categories of user behaviour, i.e. the same person could be theoretically a dumb fuck in some situations and a smart user in another.
          • inverted_deflector@startrek.website
            1·
            11 months ago

            This isnt really true about beehaw though. Their mods actually have really good heads on their shoulders when it comes to policy and enforcement.

            Their goal is to protect the general vibe of the place and their prime rule beyond of course not being a bigot is to “Be(e) Nice”. Discussions are meant to be had in good faith and if someone is say spready hate speech and someone tells them to fuck off the mod will likely bad(and depending on what they said delete) the hater and probably do nothing to the person who told them to fuck off.

            They will go after people who are arguing in bad faith, trolls, people who are being too aggro for no reason, and of course people getting into a fight who need to cool it.

            Their more simplified ruleset is to combat what is often seen when you have the more reddit style strict rules. Where you wind up with users knowing just how to be a dickhead without actually breaking the rules and ruin the place. If a mod bans or deletes a post when the person isnt breaking a rule but stinking up the subreddit then the user causes drama towards the “abusive mod”. So the mods then put in more and more rules until the subreddit becomes bland or hostile towards posters. In this example if someone posts hate speech and someone calmly just tells them to fuck off then both posters will have to be penalized for breaking rules.

            The beehaw system allows for discretion. Ive also seen admins and mods on that site try and talk things out with posters who are causing a stink and giving them a good faith opportunity before showing them the door.

            • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
              1·
              11 months ago

              We’re talking about apples and oranges. Or rather, fruits and oranges. Contrast my note #1 with your comment:

              [Me] For the sake of this comment, I’m defining “dumb fuck” as someone who assumes too much, oversimplifies, disregards context, focuses too much on who says it instead of what is being said, lacks basic understanding of what other users say, or a mix of those.

              [You] people who are arguing in bad faith, trolls, people who are being too aggro for no reason, and of course people getting into a fight who need to cool it. […] say spready hate speech […] users knowing just how to be a dickhead without actually breaking the rules and ruin the place […] if someone posts hate speech […]

              You’re talking about intentionally socially disruptive behaviour; Beehaw does address it. However I’m talking about bad = non-contributive behaviour in general, regardless of “intentions” or “faith”.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
        43·
        11 months ago

        Of course the other instance is sh.itfullof.nazis, I have yet to see a single comment from there that wasn’t cryptofash garbage

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
      134·
      11 months ago

      And because Beehaw is the NIMBYest of NIMBY instances, defederating at the drop of a hat. Come to think of it, didn’t they end up defederating from federation itself?

      • inverted_deflector@startrek.website
        1·
        11 months ago

        I mean theyre trying to keep a chill and civl environment and the mods are volunteers who got tired of having to put up with a disproportionately large amount of comments from very specific instances. Since the mod tools they need in order to better handle this influx wasnt there they took the nuclear option. Something which they did not do lightly.

        You can check out: https://beehaw.org/instances

        and see they blocked a lot, but most of what they blocked was trash and they are federated with way more instances.

        They do plan on leaving though. They predate the reddit bump by more than a year and they only wanted to be a smaller online community and not a reddit replacement and they havent been able to get the tools they need patched into lemmy.

  • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
    49·
    11 months ago

    Essentially it was because it was one of a small number of instances that had open signups without having to write an application (no matter how simple). Reducing the friction of getting an account and starting to use the site is more important than you would think.

    Once it is popular then that is the one people will recommend since that is the instance they are familiar with.

  • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
    44·
    11 months ago

    I chose it because it sounds general, honestly. Joining a more specific sounding instance just seemed kind of arbitrary and confusing. I love Star Trek, but I still don’t want that to always appear with my name, for example.

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
    38·
    11 months ago

    I tried for 2 months to join all kinds of instances and they were all silent & unresponsive. .world is the only one that responded and finally worked.

  • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    361·
    11 months ago

    I think the big thing is not having any requirements to join, you just make an account and you’re in. I started out trying to join a different instance and the second I saw a list of questions to answer I noped out and came here.

  • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
    332·
    11 months ago

    For the same reason cities form: the larger they get the more benefit there is to being there, so they keep getting larger.

    I like the federation model and have switched from twitter/reddit to mastodon/lemmy. Still, we should expect and plan for massive instances, because of their inherent advantages. (More users = more content, more referrals to new users. Lower cost per user in terms of servers/resources)

    Ultimately what I’d like to see are democratically run instances. Right now each server is essentially a benevolent dictatorship, which is fine when they’re small and/or you don’t have much invested in an account. Once they start to get big and making a change is a lot of work, it becomes more problematic.

    Social.coop on mastodon is cool, however not necessarily geared to scale. I think if there was a multi-stakeholder coop where employees can make a living and users get input on how it’s run, that could really take off.

    • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
      82·
      11 months ago

      I guess that is what people coming from corporate social media believe, but federation means that anyone, regardless the size of the instance, can interact with anything. When I switched from lemm.ee to Mander, which is a lot smaller, my user experience barely changed aside from that I can now browse science communities with ‘local’.

      e: grammar

      • TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee
        16·
        11 months ago

        That means nothing to the average Joe. Joe saw a comment mentioning Lemmy under a post on reddit. Got curious, went to join-lemmy.org.

        “What the fuck is an instance? - he thinks. I don’t care, where are the posts? Okay, a lot of these things seem to be specific domains, maybe they are for specific countries or interests. I don’t have any of that. The fuck is federation? I don’t fucking care, show me the posts already. Okay, .world is the largest, the name implies it’s for everybody. Cool, register. Next, next, fucking finally here are the posts.”

        That’s why.

    • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
      4·
      11 months ago

      But that doesn’t make a lot of sense since it doesn’t matter on what instance a community is hosted or a user first registered. That’s the whole point of the Fediverse…

      • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
        21·
        11 months ago

        It makes a difference for the person hosting an instance. Suppose you’re hosting an instance with ten users, and you run into some kind of configuration issue, and stuff isn’t working right. Or maybe the server cost is more than you expected. You might just decide to let it shut down. If you have ten thousand users you might decide to stick it out because people are counting on you. Or you’re getting donations from a hundred people, so you decide to make it work because so many people are counting on you, or maybe there’s a specialist who’s also a user, and they help you figure out the issue.

  • superbirra@lemmy.world
    281·
    11 months ago

    it is not clear what your expectation is, tho: should people somehow magically load balance between unknown alternatives? What exactly is the point beside ‘big is bad’?

    • nutsack@lemmy.world
      4·
      11 months ago

      there is no point. instances that get too big for their budget can pause sign ups anytime they want.

    • d-RLY?@lemmy.ml
      3·
      11 months ago

      True, it is really up to the instance to decide if they want to stay small and turn off registrations or big and keep them turned on. So long as the instances of all sizes stick to the official standards of the Lemmy codebase and respect the specs of the various other federated systems. It is not really an issue that the average user should have to worry about (for most issues at least).

  • Sensitivezombie@lemmy.zip
    24·
    11 months ago

    I first joined lemmy.world during the exudus because it was the most recommended one. Soon after, dropped it and joined lemmy.zip. My reason was world’s uptime issue, going dark because of constant DDoS attacks (not their fault) and the last straw for me was the ban of piracy community. I love lemmy.zip, they don’t ban instances or communities unless it absolutely warrants in which case the mods reached out to members for vote. Another big reason I love zip is because the mods are very chill and don’t overstep. I haven’t had any technical issue with zip.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
      25·
      11 months ago

      The DDoS attacks are totally their fault, as are the constant CSAM attacks, because those are the kinds of people they keep around. The only websites I’ve ever seen sustain multiple DDoS attacks are those run by admins who passively protect child abusers and nazis because they’re the kinds of thin-skinned crackers who will go nuclear on even the slightest of perceived inconvenience, or sometimes for no reason at all.

  • AzureDiamond@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    11 months ago

    Many (relatively) smaller instances have a target audience. When you are new and don’t want to get “locked in”, a general instance feels just right. That’s how I chose mine.