I don’t understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
Lemmy.ml actively asked people to sign up elsewhere. They have a small server and aren’t meant to be a general instance.
Lemmy.world is run by people who have one of the larger Mastodon servers, and actively advertises to be open and neutral.
It’s also the devs server and they have Lemmy code to write. Can’t be spending time moderating.
And the other stuff
It’s also presented as the default on most apps, I believe
That’s a big one. People tend to go with the default
That’s a problem that will reveal itself later. Decentralization goes away when everyone flocks to one server. Turns into Reddit 2.0
I’m not sure whether the issues plaguing Reddit really apply to lemmy, even with a single instance being disproportionately larger than the others, which makes “Reddit 2.0” a bit less derogatory to me. Reddit’s moderator tools were severely lacking for the required output (federation helps diffuse communities, and lemmy doesn’t encourage bots to swarm in order to increase apparent user numbers for investor satisfaction), every big anti-hate decision required a media spectacle to precede it (admins here aren’t free speech absolutists with authoritarian hard-ons), and staff retention at Reddit is an odd loop of promotion into managerial obsolescence which severely increases overhead (irrelevant to lemmy). Reddit 2.0 wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to me.
This is the correct answer. The devs have been saying this for years but new users often weren’t aware of this and saw it as the default instance. It’s good to see that’s changed.
They’re not neutral though. They’ve already started defederating instances with users whose opinions they don’t like.
Well I said they advertise, not that they are.
I think most of it has to do with that lemmy.world has better hardware than other instances. The admin Rudd has a lot of experience running federated services as well. So it may be his first rodeo lemmy-wise but not hosting a federated service with a large user-base.
So when a lot of smaller instances started getting overwhelmed and stopping signups, lemmy.world was going strong without the performance issues that other instances might see.
That along with the fact that NSFW content is allowed makes lemmy.world a good alternative for Reddit refugees looking for something stable with a similar set of rules as well.
I myself joined lemmy.ml at first, then beehaw.org when lemmy.ml asked everyone to spread out, and finally found home on lemmy.world because I didn’t really like how downvotes are disabled on beehaw. Not to mention the defederation that beehaw has done recently. Although I can understand and appreciate why they’ve done that.
I don’t know man, I’m here because shit just works.
I signed up on the 12th, after spending a little time comparing with the information I had. My thought process was:
- I was uncomfortable with the fact that .ml was hosted in Malaysia
- I thought a larger instance might mean it sticks around longer, but didn’t really want to be on the largest (which .ml was)
- Beehaw seemed otherwise a good fit, but their policies seemed too restrictive
- .world seemed to have liberal policies, allowed NSFW, was large but not largest, and was hosted in a country that didn’t worry me
I was uncomfortable with the fact that .ml was hosted in Malaysia
Not to discount your other points, but lemmy.ml isn’t hosted in Malaysia. The .ml TLD is for Mali, a country in Africa. And the site is hosted by OVH, on servers in France.
Wow, thanks for that, I really thought .ml was Malaysia. While I had some mild concerns about Malaysia, isn’t Mali a shit show as far as human rights? If the servers are in France, that mitigates a lot, but I think I have more concerns about Mali.
Mali has nothing to do with the instance though. Every country has a top level domain, like .CA or .UK etc. Most of them you have to pay to make a website using the domain. Mali is one country that lets anybody use the ML domain for free. That’s the only reason Lemmy.ml uses it, they have nothing to do with Mali else-wise. (Well there is the bit about ML = Marxist Leninist, but that is a bit of a backronym.)
