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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.
I was on LW at first but made a switch specifically because the instancencouldn't handle the influx
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.
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.
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).
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.
alien.top
I never heard of that instance, it has over one milion users but zero communities, what kind of a instance is that??
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.
I remember when I joined, there was a list of suggested default instances. I don't remember the actual list, but it was something like:
Lemmy.randomletters
Radical.politics
Jimbos.diy.server
Swearword.motherfuckers
Lemmy.world
Yeah. I continue to be confused by the names of some of them. Wtf is a blaja or whatever
It's an Ikea stuffed shark that's become a mascot for trans people because it happens to be pink and blue. lemmy.blahaj.zone is an instance for LGBTQ folks.
(I'm aware of this mainly because !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone often has content near the top of "all", but I sometimes hesitate to comment on it because I don't want to intrude.)
I think there are two big reasons...
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:
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.
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.
I joined because it didn't require jumping through any hoops to join and was featured prominently on the join-lemmy website.
Just to be clear, Beehaw defederated LW and many others because they allowed for open sign ups.
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;
I wouldn’t use Beehaw as the standard, they are way too strict on their moderation in many’s opinion.
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.
~~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!
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?
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.
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.
Little did you know startrek.website was gonna become the coolest instance of all!
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.
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.
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.
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'?
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.
Because it's hipster reddit, making it twice as insufferable as normal reddit
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.
I first joined lemmy.ml in 2020 but left because of its association with lemmygrad. Lemmy.world had good uptime, decent moderation (I never saw spam until last week), was largely uncontroversial (before blocking piracy at dbzer0), and was open when others closed their signups (that's why Beehaw defederated).
However, things have mostly settled now, and we have multiple instances with capable staff, so you might wonder why the majority is still on Lemmy.world. I think the answer is simple, it's still one of the standard recommendations, there is no large disadvantage to using lemmy.world over anything else and most importantly people can't migrate their account to another instance after joining. I personally plan on continuing to use lemmy.world for the time being.
people can’t migrate their account to another instance after joining
Just for reference, the recommended workaround to export the subs and block lists is https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
I'm aware of the workaround, but this is far from perfect. It does not redirect replies or comments as far as I'm aware.
Simply because people didn’t and still don’t understand how all of this works.
You can't blame people for the (sometimes) limited brainset they receive.
If it's unclear to the majority, then it's Lemmy which should aim to simplify the process of joining/explaining it to the general population.
Federated software is awesome, but sadly the recruiting process is still too difficult for many.
If it's unclear which app to download / which instance to join, then that's where a lot of registrations are being missed out on.
On top of the other comments, I'd also like to point out that it's a little unfair to blame a brand new fediverse user for not understanding how it works.
I know I certainly didn't understand how it worked with my first account, but you learn over time by using and interacting. You need to make an account first though to get to that point. Lemmy.world is a safe option for a new user who probably doesn't understand the specifics of the decision of where to make an account.
What do you think people are not understanding?
I wanted an account on a Lemmy instance, and Lemmy.world is one. Since then, I've been pleased with most of what the admins are doing with it.
And they haven't gotten bored and abandoned the instance like a lot of the smaller ones have gone.
I think choosing a large popular instance to store your account info, posts and comment history makes sense. Also, not having great info about how your credentials are handled on all of these different instances makes people tend to congregate under the idea that more users means better outcome for any grievances. Seems safer. What am I missing?
Because the main general purpose instance(.ml)'s server was dying under the influx of redditoids
@Masimatutu Mander is where many of the cool science communities are though. :-)
I also feel like it goes against the idea of the Fediverse that one instance has control over most of the platform.
I agree. But I think what has happened is people are bringing a web 2.0 social media mentality to the fediverse. Instead of adjusting to decentralization/federation they are essentially trying to recreate centralization by clustering in the one spot.
Lemmy.world's size and low friction signup became self-perpetuating for people who thought they were going "where everyone else is" and were afraid of missing out.
As the fediverse matures, I think we will see less obsession with recruitment or with needing to be the biggest/only community for whatever subject.
The one I wanted to join literally had a notice on the sign up page saying that they didn't accept email addresses from my host. The one I joined before .world collapsed under the weight of the Reddit migration a couple of days into Spez's meltdown and still hasn't come back. .world turned out to be stable and well-built enough for me to actually stick around.
Lemmy needs something like the Mastodon server covenant, I think.
Mostly just open applications. Though others are extremely easy to join.
I started there during the Great Reddit Migration. Made a few arguments against general censorship, and was downvoted to hell and back. Left when they blocked the piracy sub. Never looked back.
I think part of the issue stems from Lemmy not having a good way of tracking a topic / community defined on multiple instances, so you have to track a community on each instance. People want the most active one, so they track the one on LW since it has the most members. And since they track mostly communities on LW it also makes sense to just use LW as the primary.
If Lemmy could have some inbuilt support for tags or subscribing to a topic / multi-instance community, I think people could feel less inclined of defaulting to the largest instance.
As @Masimatutu points out, for a community on another instance, you normally only see the subscriber count of people from your own instance who are subscribed there, which can make other instances look smaller than they are.
If Lemmy could have some inbuilt support for tags or subscribing to a topic / multi-instance community,
I think you are right. Kbin now has multi-communities called Collections, and it's a bit of a gamechanger.
We can make our own and/or follow other people's public multis on various topics. I am now seeing so much more content from way more instances.
One of the other advantages of LW is that it's run from the EU and thus has to comply with the GDPR. Given all the shit that Reddit pulled during the exodus, this may have been an additional reason for people to choose LW over one of the North American instances.