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.
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
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.
Because it's hipster reddit, making it twice as insufferable as normal reddit
I find Lemmy much more helpful and pleasant to use than Reddit. If that makes it hipster Reddit then I'm all for it!
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.
Because the main general purpose instance(.ml)'s server was dying under the influx of redditoids
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.
I thought it was because lemmy.ml closed registrations?
My original account is on lemmy.ml, but then I made this one on hexbear.net which now I use as my main, and I remember lemmy.ml was open long enough so I was able to create mine right before majority left reddit and then they were closed as it really spiked. I'm not sure if lemmy.ml registrations are open again but when most people were seeking to join Lemmy and lemmy.ml was closed then it seemed like lemmy.world was the default by default.
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.
The lemmy.ml devs encouraged Ledditors to go there and a few other places instead.
