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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Idk about other people, but I don't really know how the instances work and the lemmy.world instance name seems the least abstract. Beehaw was confusing because it's not called lemmy so idk if it's a different thing or what, and idk what .ml means or stands for. Lemmy.world just looks like it's the default lemmy instance to me as a dunce who doesn't know how lemmy works.

Well put! I'm still very confused about "instances," and the way people talk about them makes it seem like you need to sign up for each one? But that can't be right, that would be way too confusing! Right? Lol.

Lemmy.world also seems like the best place to ask questions. Everyone I've encountered has been very helpful, and I see a lot of people talking about how positive the community is. So I'm trying to just sit back and enjoy the ride!

Imagine phone companies. An instance is like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile or any other provider.

If you want to talk to your friends, it doesn't really matter what instance they're on.
A Verizon customer can still call a AT&T customer no problem. A Verizon customer doesn't need to also sign up for AT&T to do that. It all just.. works.

People talking about different instances is like people talking about different phone companies. "Verizon's coverage is better" or "T-Mobile has better support" or that kinda thing.

All the analogies to mobile providers reminds me of the time when they're was no interoperability for mms. Sms iirc worked but you better have the same company as a friend if you wanted to send that grainy vga photo you just took with your fancy new razr.

I signed up on lemmy.ca yet you signed up on lemmy.world. We can interact though.

This community we are interacting on is in lemmy.world's instance but since our two instances are federated (work together like many others) we can interact in general and through any community in our instances or other instances that are federated with ours.

And are usernames unique across instances or can anyone copy anyone else's username by signing up somewhere else with the same name or just making a new instance?

I see nobody else explained, so I might as well.

Each instance has their own users, communities and rules. A user can subscribe to any community on any instance that's not blocked. Sometimes it's important to know the rules of the instance the community is on, because different things are allowed.

If I'm a user on lemmy.srv.eco, for example, I can still subscribe to any lemmy.world community and post/comment/vote just like a lemmy.world user.

The only real downside of being on a smaller instance is that you'll have to do a bit more work actively subscribing to things. An instance only pulls in a community if at least one user subscribes to it. On a big server, your all is very full of communities as there are more people subscribing to more diverse things. On a smaller instance, you'll need to do that yourself.

The advantage of being on a smaller instance is that with less load on the server, it'll work much faster.

Similar for me -- but add onto it, when I joined, lemmy.world was the only one of the top 3 most populated instances (with lemmy.ml and beehaw) that had open registration