I don’t understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
I signed up on the 12th, after spending a little time comparing with the information I had. My thought process was:
- I was uncomfortable with the fact that .ml was hosted in Malaysia
- I thought a larger instance might mean it sticks around longer, but didn’t really want to be on the largest (which .ml was)
- Beehaw seemed otherwise a good fit, but their policies seemed too restrictive
- .world seemed to have liberal policies, allowed NSFW, was large but not largest, and was hosted in a country that didn’t worry me
I was uncomfortable with the fact that .ml was hosted in Malaysia
Not to discount your other points, but lemmy.ml isn’t hosted in Malaysia. The .ml TLD is for Mali, a country in Africa. And the site is hosted by OVH, on servers in France.
I don’t think it stands for either, I saw somewhere that it stands for Marx-Lenin since the founders are communists
It is indeed a Mali domain, but of course people choose their domains because of their niche community - in case of .ml, it often stands for “Machine Learning”. In this case I am pretty sure you are right and it is meant to represent " Marxist/Leninist" in this case, it is known that the instance admins are close to that ideology.
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.
I think you nailed it. It comes down to usability and user experience. Migrating from Reddit and not knowing shit about fuck, I obviously choose the largest sounding instance (.world). I still haven’t understood the whole thing yet, but the novelty is exciting and I’m willing to learn. Mass adoption needs a more streamlined experience though.
Honestly going for the ‘largest’ instance is kind of
dumbnaive. Smaller, faster instances provide a much better experience. Bigger is not better in the fediverse.The whole point is to decentralise power away from a single instance, CEO or monopoly. If you’re on a small instance you can still see all the content you want from all the other instances and you might even get a meaningful say in how your experience develops.
We don’t want to build another Reddit we want to build an alternative that is better structured.
Is it really that dumb though? Small instances might provide a better experience until they close down.
