1y ago

How did Lemmy World become the default instance?

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.

166 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  Same here, switched cause of the down time mostly
- 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
  
  sh.itjust.works is barely a swear
  
  Also you forgot ShItEjUsTwEr.K.s

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.

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:
When the Reddit exodus started (slightly earlier than people had anticipated), .world was one of the only instances that didn't require a proper application to join.
There was a bug where acceptance emails weren't being delivered to Gmail addresses (probably some others too but for obvious reasons Gmail was noticed first). That meant people waiting for their applications to be accepted on other servers didn't realise they had been. As well as this some people were just impatient waiting in general so gave up on their original instance choice and joined .world instead.
Other instances also started to close registrations completely due to not being able to handle the scaling. World wasn't handling it great but Ruud specifically announced he wouldn't be closing signups, which is one of the reasons it became the default recommendation while everything was on fire.
There was a thread tracking how quickly we were growing, I remember us celebrating 1000 users and then a couple weeks later 100,000! And that was kind of exciting so I can't blame people for wanting to be part of it.
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.
  
  Same, I follow a search result there sometimes but essentially just logged out there, signed up here, and that was that. The Reddit Days seem like another lifetime now.
- Thanks Grandma. :)
- 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.
  Exactly my feeling

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.
  
  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!
  
  Of course the other instance is sh.itfullof.nazis, I have yet to see a single comment from there that wasn't cryptofash garbage
- 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?
  
  I still see a few posts and comments from Beehaw so I don't think so.
  
  I mean theyre trying to keep a chill and civl environment and the mods are volunteers who got tired of having to put up with a disproportionately large amount of comments from very specific instances. Since the mod tools they need in order to better handle this influx wasnt there they took the nuclear option. Something which they did not do lightly.
  You can check out: https://beehaw.org/instances
  and see they blocked a lot, but most of what they blocked was trash and they are federated with way more instances.
  They do plan on leaving though. They predate the reddit bump by more than a year and they only wanted to be a smaller online community and not a reddit replacement and they havent been able to get the tools they need patched into lemmy.

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!
  
  Which reminds me, is there a way to view all communities in another instance?

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.
- I guess that is what people coming from corporate social media believe, but federation means that anyone, regardless the size of the instance, can interact with anything. When I switched from lemm.ee to Mander, which is a lot smaller, my user experience barely changed aside from that I can now browse science communities with 'local'.
  e: grammar
  
  That means nothing to the average Joe. Joe saw a comment mentioning Lemmy under a post on reddit. Got curious, went to join-lemmy.org.
  "What the fuck is an instance? - he thinks. I don't care, where are the posts? Okay, a lot of these things seem to be specific domains, maybe they are for specific countries or interests. I don't have any of that. The fuck is federation? I don't fucking care, show me the posts already. Okay, .world is the largest, the name implies it's for everybody. Cool, register. Next, next, fucking finally here are the posts."
  That's why.
- But that doesn't make a lot of sense since it doesn't matter on what instance a community is hosted or a user first registered. That's the whole point of the Fediverse...
  
  It makes a difference for the person hosting an instance. Suppose you're hosting an instance with ten users, and you run into some kind of configuration issue, and stuff isn't working right. Or maybe the server cost is more than you expected. You might just decide to let it shut down. If you have ten thousand users you might decide to stick it out because people are counting on you. Or you're getting donations from a hundred people, so you decide to make it work because so many people are counting on you, or maybe there's a specialist who's also a user, and they help you figure out the issue.

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'?
- there is no point. instances that get too big for their budget can pause sign ups anytime they want.
- True, it is really up to the instance to decide if they want to stay small and turn off registrations or big and keep them turned on. So long as the instances of all sizes stick to the official standards of the Lemmy codebase and respect the specs of the various other federated systems. It is not really an issue that the average user should have to worry about (for most issues at least).

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.
- The DDoS attacks are totally their fault, as are the constant CSAM attacks, because those are the kinds of people they keep around. The only websites I've ever seen sustain multiple DDoS attacks are those run by admins who passively protect child abusers and nazis because they're the kinds of thin-skinned crackers who will go nuclear on even the slightest of perceived inconvenience, or sometimes for no reason at all.

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!
- Is this irony? If so, well done.
  
  This is the other side of the iron curtain my friend
  
  I consider Lemmy mostly performance art.
- And you were doing it before it was cool?

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.
- 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)
- No disadvantages? Idk, there is the whole disadvantage of .world being defederated from lemmygrad. :)

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.
  
  👋
- 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.
  
  On the other hand, I see a few times a week some people saying that they only browse communities on their instance because they don't want to create accounts on every instance, and they cannot use their credentials on other instances.
- 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.
  
  I agree but I’m not trying to “blame” anybody. Get this sensitive bullshit talk out of here. Lemmy’s to blame overall, but it’s complicated.
- 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?
- Yeah, I think lemmy gets glossed over a lot. Few actually understand it. Yesterday people were responding to some of my comments after I deleted them. I have no idea but I guess that means some instances don't federate deletes or something?

Because the main general purpose instance(.ml)'s server was dying under the influx of redditoids
- I see waaay more complaints about Hexbear than Reddit refugees.
  
  A spectre is haunting lemmy, the spectre of good takes and being uncivil to bigots.
  (Who have to run off and complain about how scary those hexbears are)
  
  Yeah because liberals hate being called on their internalized fascism and would rather screech about 'tankies' than address it.
  
  Why would you leave a passive-aggressive comment about hexbear when the user made a legitimate point about the influx of redditors overloading .ml servers during the exodus?

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.
- What was your email host?
  
  Gmail.

@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.
- It's also worth noting that human beings are not 100% rational creatures, always thoroughly collecting data and making careful decisions about what will get them the best results. Instead they're just a little bit lazier than that.
  Theoretically laziness is a biological adaptation that improves survivability for part of the population during times of famine.

Mostly just open applications. Though others are extremely easy to join.

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.
- You can see global active users and local subscribers, which is enough for me, since people on my instace are more likely to have the same interests. If I need global stats, though, there is https://browse.feddit.de/
- Remote access of other communities is a smoldering mess. You have to hope the community you want to subscribe to shows up in All or you have to know its name and use the search feature. There's no way to see another instance's communities, unless you have an account there, which is a huge problem because you have to go through the huge hassle of signing up for an instance just so you can find the community, and oh yeah, most instances aren't even open to invitation so it's not even possible in a lot of cases.
  Also if you get banned from a community it force-unsubscribes you, and if you get banned from an instance it won't even tell you.

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.

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.

Defaultitis.

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.

It's a containment instance to keep the kids busy.
- Funny, isn't that how Facebook started? 🥲

The lemmy.ml devs encouraged Ledditors to go there and a few other places instead.

I picked it because I liked the name.

During the "critical phase" it was simply a lot more reliable than lemmy.ml with less downtime and faster response times so people switched to it. It also has a less strict policy on NSFW content - something that a lot of people want in their daily online time.

I started on kbin. The content I was enjoying was all from lemmy.world so when I ditched kbin I just came over here.

Because I joined it and they followed.

They promised to be the exact same kind of nazi bar that reddit was, and they succeeded. I personally like they soaked up all the reactionaries running away from reddit because their CEO is... jewish, or whatever they came up with. Keeps em off reddit and more importantly off here.
- lemmy.ml
  Yeah this tracks
  
  Mfers escape a capitalist platform falling under its own contradictions only to surprise-pikachu face when people actually have left views.
  Honestly lemmy developers need to charge people to use their platform if they're just going to use it to be anticommunist. They're never going to do it because it goes against their values, but it would be cathartic as fuck if they did, and you mfers would pay up, too.

Comment sorting
Interactivity
Active communities

The piracy community was unblocked quite soon after

When I joined most instances either required approval or were straight closed, whereas LW did not, so I joined LW for a little while before jumping to another that had opened up during one of the moderation policy updates.
So availability plus as an instance grows more people tend to recommend it.

I came here because lemmy.one wouldn't defederate with hexbear
- What's hexbear? I'm out of the loop
  
  Tankie community, think of where all ChapoTrapHouse users migrated when Reddit banned them. These guys post pro communist stuff way too much; and some people don't like to get bombarded with that.

166 comments