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How did Lemmy World become the default instance? (mander.xyz)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Masimatutu@mander.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] TeaHands@lemmy.world 60 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

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 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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 6 points 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.

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