this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2022
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Asklemmy
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Absolutely. And I'd go as far as to defend both lemmy.ml and lemmygrad's right to run their instances any way they want.
Not by any metrics, IMO. I think it's been explicitly stated by the admins that lemmy.ml is not a main instance or a flagship instance. It's not a general instance but a "community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts". The devs doesn't even recommend lemmy.ml on join-lemmy.org, but rather two general purpose instances instead.
Of course, promoting that it's run by the devs do give off some pretty strong "official/main" vibes to any users.
Saying that lemmy.ml is the main instance is somewhat contributing to the problem, no offense intended. What we should say is that there isn't any main instance, and that size doesn't matter since we're all (in theory) federated. If anything, users should check out join-lemmy.org/instances for a meta-community that seems like a good fit.
I believe that people confuse the difference between Lemmy, the federated platform, and Lemmy.ml, the federated social news aggregator. If new users had a better knowledge on how everything is interconnected instead of the standard monolithic islands, maybe they wouldn't seek out the "main" or even biggest instances for a fear of missing out.