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 [email protected]), 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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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. https://old.lemmy.world/post/1720870
Oh wow yeah the “I’m going to destroy your server” guy. I wonder what happened to him.
Probably still around under a different name or over on hexbear with all the other like-minded individuals.
No this had nothing to do with Hexbear
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.
Ok just want to make it clear that we never suspected Hexbear to be involved. This started before we defederated with them.
*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.
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.
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
alien.top
I never heard of that instance, it has over one milion users but zero communities, what kind of a instance is that??
Reddit mirror, see https://lemm.ee/post/16850498
Oh god, I see, thanks for the link!
@jeena pretty sure it’s bots.
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 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 because it didn’t require jumping through any hoops to join and was featured prominently on the join-lemmy website.
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 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
Ironic curtain
I consider Lemmy mostly performance art.
And you were doing it before it was cool?
Because the main general purpose instance(.ml)'s server was dying under the influx of redditoids
deleted by creator
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?
I didn’t read the point that way at all. They seemed to be implying that Reddit users scared people away from .ml and to .world. I have no personal issue with you guys from lemmygrad and hexbear, but a lot of people do since you can come across a bit abrasive. So, I thought that was a bit of an ironic thing to say.
I think you misunderstood their comment? They’re saying the high number of active users coming from Reddit was too much for the computers to handle at the time, not that the Redditors themselves were scaring people away. The speed and downtime of the .ml instance at the time is what they are saying drove people to .world.
I remember world was a bit better at the time, but both instances were frequently struggling with performance after the third-party app ban.
Oh, yeah, if that’s what they meant, I do remember that. The biggest struggle was that the software was itself a bit rough, as (admittedly) a refugee myself, which to the admin’s credit has gotten much better.
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.
Mostly just open applications. Though others are extremely easy to join.
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.
