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.
From https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (regarding reasons for defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works)
I wouldn’t use Beehaw as the standard, they are way too strict on their moderation in many’s opinion.
This is really what’s is beginning to bother me. I came from Reddit with the fuck-spez-wave searching for an alternative, and Lemmy somehow sounded interesting and a new way of doing things.
I can live with the lag of content, that will come, but more and more it looks like every server is their own little community with whatever weirdnesses they have, and each one has a bunch of moderators, most good, some bad, but all doing what they think is best.
When you’re just a mainstream user looking for content and debate, and take no interest in server drama, defederations and whatever, it’s all just unwanted noise and irritating.
I understand the frustration, but I do believe this is a strength of Lemmy. Small; individual communities is what gives incentive to stay independent, and if you just want the broader content, that’s exactly where and why large instances like Lemmy World is also beneficial.
Of course the other instance is sh.itfullof.nazis, I have yet to see a single comment from there that wasn’t cryptofash garbage