How did Lemmy.world become more popular than Lemmy.ml?

gylotip@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 470 points –

I don't understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.

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Lemmy.ml actively asked people to sign up elsewhere. They have a small server and aren't meant to be a general instance.

Lemmy.world is run by people who have one of the larger Mastodon servers, and actively advertises to be open and neutral.

It’s also the devs server and they have Lemmy code to write. Can’t be spending time moderating.

It's also presented as the default on most apps, I believe

That’s a big one. People tend to go with the default

That's why the apps on the official stores are so important. Convenience wins.

Rule of the defaults. Most people use whatever the default is. That's why there is always a push to he the default thing. Microsoft pushes edge on their stuff, Google pushes chrome, apps pushes safari, etc.

That’s also why Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to be Safari’s default search engine. Most people can’t be bothered to change their defaults/don’t want to after having it as their default for so long.

That's a problem that will reveal itself later. Decentralization goes away when everyone flocks to one server. Turns into Reddit 2.0

I’m not sure whether the issues plaguing Reddit really apply to lemmy, even with a single instance being disproportionately larger than the others, which makes “Reddit 2.0” a bit less derogatory to me. Reddit’s moderator tools were severely lacking for the required output (federation helps diffuse communities, and lemmy doesn’t encourage bots to swarm in order to increase apparent user numbers for investor satisfaction), every big anti-hate decision required a media spectacle to precede it (admins here aren’t free speech absolutists with authoritarian hard-ons), and staff retention at Reddit is an odd loop of promotion into managerial obsolescence which severely increases overhead (irrelevant to lemmy). Reddit 2.0 wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to me.

This is the correct answer. The devs have been saying this for years but new users often weren't aware of this and saw it as the default instance. It's good to see that's changed.

They’re not neutral though. They’ve already started defederating instances with users whose opinions they don’t like.