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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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[–] inverted_deflector@startrek.website 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah before the reddit migration the top instances were lemmygrad and a far more stalinist friendly lemmy.ml . Beehaw was also there but beehaw didnt have open registration and the process also became bugged out around the time the expansion happened so people would write their application to join and get no notifications or anything that they were in. Also beehaw manually reviewed the accounts at the time so it was a slow process.

Other large instances also didnt want to become the largest one while .world wanted to grow at all costs. With open registration and didnt even require emails at first(which honestly reddit didnt either for a while, but reddit had better mod tools for its time)