Asklemmy

50322 readers

581 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

228

How did Lemmy World become the default instance? (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

146 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think part of the issue stems from Lemmy not having a good way of tracking a topic / community defined on multiple instances, so you have to track a community on each instance. People want the most active one, so they track the one on LW since it has the most members. And since they track mostly communities on LW it also makes sense to just use LW as the primary.

If Lemmy could have some inbuilt support for tags or subscribing to a topic / multi-instance community, I think people could feel less inclined of defaulting to the largest instance.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

As @Masimatutu points out, for a community on another instance, you normally only see the subscriber count of people from your own instance who are subscribed there, which can make other instances look smaller than they are.

If Lemmy could have some inbuilt support for tags or subscribing to a topic / multi-instance community,

I think you are right. Kbin now has multi-communities called Collections, and it's a bit of a gamechanger.

We can make our own and/or follow other people's public multis on various topics. I am now seeing so much more content from way more instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You can see global active users and local subscribers, which is enough for me, since people on my instace are more likely to have the same interests. If I need global stats, though, there is https://browse.feddit.de/