Probably a very polarizing question.
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
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The issue is that a tool to migrate all contents, likes and followers doesn’t exist so people are afraid to build on small instances
True, but after all this time I wouldn’t trust Lemm.ee or SJW less than LW
Hot take: No.
Lemmy.world being the “main” instance is natural, and Lemmy makes it difficult to discover new communities so it’s also natural that lots of discussion would be in lemmy.world, too.
There was also still an unresolved issue where some instances can disappear and take out all their communities. Remember lemmy.film? I believe the Lemmy devs once said they want to make a system to migrate communities in case something like this happens but nobody knows when it’ll get added.
I think it’s a platform problem, I understand that connecting to all sorts of instances is the point of the fediverse but until it becomes more intuitive and less dangerous, I’m going to just stick with the most popular communities. Attempting to move people out of lemmy.world and into other duplicate communities will only split people more.
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.
Shamelessly plugging lemm.ee- it is exactly what you’re looking for when you say general purpose instance
lemmy.world has middling to bad moderation.
lemmy.world also has at least a few divisive mods who are close friends of the lemmy.world admins and are known to retain their positions for that reason.
lemmy.world is by far the largest instance.
taken alone, none of these are a problem. together i find that concerning and exactly the kind of reason the fediverse was built to avoid.
Are there bad moderators on LW? Do you have examples? I feel like they’re maybe a little stretched thin on trying to keep up with things, and so sometimes make snap decisions, but lemmy.ml is the only place I’ve actually seen moderation that I would describe as deliberately bad.
Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).
IDK what the answer is
Hello, good to see you here!
I completely get what you mean. Beehaw creates its own kind of situation. For a long time I was hoping they would refederate with SJW and LW, especially after 0.19.X where users could block instances on their own, but I guess that’s never going to happen.
It’s really a shame, because people and communities on Beehaw are really valuable
