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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For me honestly mostly the name. World. Seems like a default instance to me. What does ml even mean?

The name absolutely matters. Federation blah blah doesn't matter what instance blah blah and all that.

But regular people will flock to a "normal" or "official" sounding name and url. I won't be surprised if lemmy.world becomes the defacto instance

Yeah going forward I'm going to just recommend lemmy.world to people, straight to the point and avoid a lot of the confusion over what instance to pick

Hopefully, World gets its stability worked out.

Imagine it requires better hosting, which can be costly.

That's why I went there as well. Seemed like the default.

I also chose mine because the name (haha funny ArchLinux meme - iusearchlinux.fyi) . But also because it didn't sound like a default instance.

Main reason is, you gotta spread the load, the original purpose of federation is to share the costs so we can keep things affordable and prevent enshittification - not to dump it all on one instance, otherwise we might as well just turn Lemmy into a monolithic structure like Reddit, like YouTube, like Facebook, like Instagram, like Twitter and so on and so forth. We don't want to outgrow donation funding. And we don't want to make one instance "too big to block" lest it starts to enshittify or get greedy and gain too much power over the rest.

In my opinion, no instance should ever be considered the "default" of any federated platform.

While I agree that spreading the load is important, that doesn't make much sense to someone who's new to federation and is possibly coming from reddit where you just join and start commenting. People are automatically searching for a default.

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That and beehive whatever sounded like a niche community and not a good launching point

Marxism–Leninism (at least that's what I made of it after hearing about the admins being tankies)

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