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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    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.ee
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      11 months 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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        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
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          11 months ago

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

          • Jay@lemmy.ca
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            11 months 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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                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
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                  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.

                  • Jay@lemmy.ca
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                    11 months ago

                    No problem, maybe I should have been more clear with my comment. I was here when all that crap went down under a different username before I switched to this .ca one as my daily driver.

        • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
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          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
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        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
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      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
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      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
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        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
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          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
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        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??