On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.

On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance

History of LW controversial decisions

when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it's still in !politics@lemmy.world )
when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )

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[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 1 year ago (10 children)

It's a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they've heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or "vanilla". Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.

This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It's the same thing with mastodon.social.

I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.

The problem is, there aren't a lot of "general purpose" Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn't know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.

[–] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.

It's a little less the case with Lemmy and other less popular fediverse stuff, but isn't a large number of vague/general purpose instances a contributor to this? In other words, wouldn't more focused instances help reduce this problem?

A big benefit of federation shines with topic-focused instances in that it ensures an already curated local feed to your main interest (or interests), meanwhile remaining able to connect with and discuss more general interest stuff via home and federated feeds.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 year ago

Definitely, but I guess the amount of sysadmins wanting to operate a lemmy instance is limited. Add to that the CSAM and other nasty stuff that happened at the beginning, and only a few people would be okay to manage their own instance.

Also, even a topic-focused instance would suffer from the lack of population. How many interesting topic can you find for a population of 50k? That can't be too precise, because you are talking to a very small population. Well, I guess that's why db0 and slrpnk are doing well, piracy and solarpunk are popular among Lemmy users (as well as whatever the political stance of lemmy.ml is)

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