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.
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
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)