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 !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com), 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.
The communism isn’t the reason why hexbear sucks. Lemmygrad is way more communist than hexbear and their posts are fire.
The main issue with hexbear is that it’s full of white male ex-nazi converts who never recovered fully from their toxic past, mixed in with people who think listening to a podcast makes you a socialist. Their moderators are also douches who everyone is afraid of dealing with so even though there are a lot of very cool and reasonable people there, the stage is instead set by that small minority of uber toxic power users. You wouldn’t believe how many DMs I got from people thanking me for standing up for basic standards of decency because everyone else was too afraid to speak up for themselves, and ultimately it ended with one of the admins unceremoniously kicking me off of the site.
In short, it’s not the communism, I want you to analyze why you think that’s the reason and be prepared for an answer you won’t like.