this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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How did Lemmy World become the default instance? (mander.xyz)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Masimatutu@mander.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 132 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

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 43 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I was on LW at first but made a switch specifically because the instancencouldn't handle the influx

[–] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 42 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh wow yeah the "I'm going to destroy your server" guy. I wonder what happened to him.

[–] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Probably still around under a different name or over on hexbear with all the other like-minded individuals.

[–] antik@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No this had nothing to do with Hexbear

[–] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ok just want to make it clear that we never suspected Hexbear to be involved. This started before we defederated with them.

[–] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 2 points 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 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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.

[–] Selkie@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

Same here, switched cause of the down time mostly

[–] iso@lemy.lol 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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.xyz 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 6 points 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 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

alien.top

I never heard of that instance, it has over one milion users but zero communities, what kind of a instance is that??

[–] Masimatutu@mander.xyz 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Reddit mirror, see https://lemm.ee/post/16850498

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 4 points 11 months ago

Oh god, I see, thanks for the link!

[–] livus@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

@jeena pretty sure it's bots.