I don’t understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
Lemmy.ml actively asked people to sign up elsewhere. They have a small server and aren’t meant to be a general instance.
Lemmy.world is run by people who have one of the larger Mastodon servers, and actively advertises to be open and neutral.
It’s also the devs server and they have Lemmy code to write. Can’t be spending time moderating.
And the other stuff
It’s also presented as the default on most apps, I believe
That’s a big one. People tend to go with the default
That’s why the apps on the official stores are so important. Convenience wins.
Rule of the defaults. Most people use whatever the default is. That’s why there is always a push to he the default thing. Microsoft pushes edge on their stuff, Google pushes chrome, apps pushes safari, etc.
That’s also why Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to be Safari’s default search engine. Most people can’t be bothered to change their defaults/don’t want to after having it as their default for so long.
That’s a problem that will reveal itself later. Decentralization goes away when everyone flocks to one server. Turns into Reddit 2.0
I’m not sure whether the issues plaguing Reddit really apply to lemmy, even with a single instance being disproportionately larger than the others, which makes “Reddit 2.0” a bit less derogatory to me. Reddit’s moderator tools were severely lacking for the required output (federation helps diffuse communities, and lemmy doesn’t encourage bots to swarm in order to increase apparent user numbers for investor satisfaction), every big anti-hate decision required a media spectacle to precede it (admins here aren’t free speech absolutists with authoritarian hard-ons), and staff retention at Reddit is an odd loop of promotion into managerial obsolescence which severely increases overhead (irrelevant to lemmy). Reddit 2.0 wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to me.
Not to mention that signups on .ml is closed so you can’t join anyway
This is the correct answer. The devs have been saying this for years but new users often weren’t aware of this and saw it as the default instance. It’s good to see that’s changed.
They’re not neutral though. They’ve already started defederating instances with users whose opinions they don’t like.
Well I said they advertise, not that they are.
I think most of it has to do with that lemmy.world has better hardware than other instances. The admin Rudd has a lot of experience running federated services as well. So it may be his first rodeo lemmy-wise but not hosting a federated service with a large user-base.
So when a lot of smaller instances started getting overwhelmed and stopping signups, lemmy.world was going strong without the performance issues that other instances might see.
That along with the fact that NSFW content is allowed makes lemmy.world a good alternative for Reddit refugees looking for something stable with a similar set of rules as well.
I myself joined lemmy.ml at first, then beehaw.org when lemmy.ml asked everyone to spread out, and finally found home on lemmy.world because I didn’t really like how downvotes are disabled on beehaw. Not to mention the defederation that beehaw has done recently. Although I can understand and appreciate why they’ve done that.
I’ve signed up for a bunch of them and still haven’t decided where I want to make my main. I know that annoys some people but I love it because it means I get to have a choice! I think I’ll have a Lemmy world account since they’re big, buti also want to find a good smaller community to have slower more meaningful conversations. I hope the Lemmy protocol adds support for account linking some day.
I’ve signed up for a bunch of them and still haven’t decided where I want to make my main.
Same story for me, although I keep coming back to Lemmy.world in the first instance, at least for the Lemmy instances (also explored kbin, tildes and squabbles). Mixed feelings about Lemmy.ml as I think there’s virtue being on the instance the devs run as it seems unlikely to go away, although there has been the talks around political views. From the political side, I do hang out more often than not in tech spaces though so I doubt it’d actually impact anything I’d want to engage in discussion about.
Also have an account with Beehaw which was my first but silly as it may seem, the name of that one puts me off a bit. “Lemmy.world” sounds like something I can more easily communicate to a friend verbally, for whatever that is worth.
I have a world and an Australian account as I am in Australia.
Indeed. Even though I’m using the Lemmy.ca instance to distribute the load, I use Ruud’s Mastodon instance.
I’ve moved once so far, but it wasn’t as straightforward forward as I’d hoped. Do you know of a simple way to migrate (export/import) communities and settings across instances?
There’s a userscript somewhere. Check !plugins
Interesting. I browse Lemmy exclusively on mobile, for a one time transfer of communities I guess I could set up greasemonkey and find that script. Thanks!
I left Beehaw because the defederated from instances where half my communities were at. Ended up on Lemmy world because they had my favorites.
I started at BeeHaw because they have a lot of cool communities. I didn’t want to write an essay (I’m exaggerating …a little) to sign up for an account so I ended up on sh.itjust.works.
Haha same. I started at beehaw but am having a hard time manually adding communities that I want to keep in that feed since they aren’t onfederated instances. So I moved to sh.ithust.works and reddthat.
I’ll probably keep beehaw, I like a lot of what it has to offer and it’s cool for it to be a specific corner for me. But one of the others will probably become my default home
Shit just works, yo.
At this point I don’t know how I got here and where I’m going and I’m too afraid to ask
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.
Wow, thanks for that, I really thought .ml was Malaysia. While I had some mild concerns about Malaysia, isn’t Mali a shit show as far as human rights? If the servers are in France, that mitigates a lot, but I think I have more concerns about Mali.
The country of Mali has little to do with lemmy.ml, apart from an annual transaction worth 10 USD.
Mali has nothing to do with the instance though. Every country has a top level domain, like .CA or .UK etc. Most of them you have to pay to make a website using the domain. Mali is one country that lets anybody use the ML domain for free. That’s the only reason Lemmy.ml uses it, they have nothing to do with Mali else-wise. (Well there is the bit about ML = Marxist Leninist, but that is a bit of a backronym.)
For me ML stands for Machine Learning. Mali is sitting on a goldmine of a tld, and could turn into Tuvalu
Good to know, thanks
Ya. I’m pretty sure they just took .ml because it was a cheaper domain, but someone’ll have to correct me on that.
The admins of .ml are tankies. The letters don’t reference a place, they reference a couple of communist leaders who the admins are fans of. I’m surprised that more people aren’t aware of that on this platform.
It’s intended to stand for Marxist - Leninist, is what I heard. I didn’t want to support a tankie thing which is why I went to world.
I don’t think it stands for either, I saw somewhere that it stands for Marx-Lenin since the founders are communists
Classic communists, making their own tlds and everything
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.
Would you feel better if they were communists and chose something completely neutral instead, like .io?
That’s such an arbitrary thing to be concerned about
I’m not implying anything, I’m just stating a fact (or at least what I think is a fact)
I love how World and Blahaj are lgbt friendly and anti authoritarianism, unlike .ml.
Can I ask what worries you about it being hosted on Malaysia?
I’m not any authority, and I could be just ignorant, but my understanding is that the Malaysian government makes liberal use of laws against sedition and that govern communication to silence dissent. There was an artist who has been jailed a couple times this year for political satire. That kind of atmosphere doesn’t seem like a good place to host communities that want free discussion.
Malaysian police are also asking Interpol to help them investigate a comedian in New York over a joke she made about Malaysia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65894721
They haven’t asked for extradition yet, but it worries me that they could ask for extradition from the US just because a US citizen made a mean joke that hurt their feelings. If they asked, would the US comply? Seems pretty anti-free-speech if they did.
That’s a pretty valid reason, I’ll have to look into it more as I already created an account on .ml. While I do call myself an anarchist/communist, I don’t zealously jump at the defense of a government without nuancing the situation.
Excep
.mlisn’t the TLD for Malaysia… .myis..mlis Mali.And TLDs have little to do with where stuff is hosted.
.itis Italy and.aiis Anguilla, but not always by Italian or Anguillan companies.I knew that .ml stand for “Marxist-Lenninist” and now that I realize the other lem thought .ml meant it’s being hosted in Malaysia I’m cracking up. That’s a fun mishap.
It’s decidedly not hosted in malaysia. I’m also unclear why that would be a problem though.
This is pretty much the same thought pattern I had, however I made my account here after Beehaw defederated and have since decided not to use it anymore. Lemmy.world reminds me so much of the older style internet and forums and it’s a breath of fresh air.
Why did I create a Lemmy world account as opposed to beehaw or ml? Because it’s the first one I saw. Because it doesn’t matter. Because I don’t know what ml stands for. Because Lenny world said “general use.” Because I didn’t have to fill out an application. Because I can still interact with everything else, and again, it doesn’t matter.
I went for the most generic “official” sounding name.
Underrated comment. I picked it because I had no idea what I was doing and it sounded all-encompassing and I wanted access to everything. I didn’t even know what an instance was. I just picked it because it sounded like a good guess to get access to all of Lemmy.
Yeah same. But from .world we’re able to access all the other instances right?
Well, not beehaw right now.
All except those it’s federated with like exploding heads and behave.
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Fun fact: those tankies are also the developers of Lemmy overall… sigh
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Yeah, the fact that lemmy.world and many other instances exist with content that the devs might not like is proof that they wrote something where their own personal views don’t affect the independence of each instance to run the way it wants.
I mean… forbidding any discussion of unpopular actions taken by Russia is pretty much an example of promoting their own views.
Yep agreed.
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Yeah I’m ok with it for now, and will chalk it up as some guys being young and idealistic with strange idiosyncratic or edgy views they might grow out of.
I’ve seen their statements trying to walk it back and they seem generally very well intentioned, I give it the benefit of doubt for now.
This is really seeming to look like “dev team was unclear that they didn’t want politics on their server. They removed comments critical of Russia. Group of people ran with this as evidence they are pro-Russia/Anti-Ukraine. dev team tried to clarify their policies but it’s too late and the PR Shitstorm already happened”.
Tough spot to be in as a “startup” FOSS platform but could totally infer that’s how it is playing out.
It was all their own words though, not just content on the server, but anyhow no worry.
As long as it doesn’t influence how they build the platform, them having absurd opinions isn’t much of a problem for the users.
It’s the whole point of the Fediverse. If their absurd opinions don’t appeal to you, you can block them or defederate their instance and not have them affect you (or your instance if you’re an admin).
Hence why I’m on Kbin. Ernest is so much better as a dev.
kbin has been my favourite so far
Kbin is an alternative. Totally different software.
Shitty people tend to clump together.
I see no political posts on that instance. Might be that politics are banned on the instance?
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When I first can to Lemmy there was a good bit of it, I think since then it’s been drowned out by all the less extreme folks.
I’m okay with the devs being communists as it means they aren’t likely to sell out to corporate interests!
As someone signing up for lemmy.world, my reasons were:
- It sounds official or at least less obscure than “.ml” or “sh.itjust.works”
- It sounded inclusive (we’re all part of the world, so to speak)
- It was in the list of default instances of Connect for Lemmy
Otherwise, I didn’t give much though to which instance to pick.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Same - sounds better, like .com vs .io and similar.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
I am new like most of us. When I signed up I had no idea what an instance was. To me the name Lemmy.world sounded like it was more general and therefore would have more content so I picked that one.
Yeah the name sounded the most inviting. It’s Lemmy… That’s the name of what I want… And it’s world, that sounds like a generic description of “everything”. But at the end of the day I just clicked a link in a comment. Seemed to me to be the more popular one suggested.
The developer for RIF told me to come here. I figured that I should trust the person that created the app that I’ve used for hundreds of hours.
Ya, I applied for beehaw.org and didn’t get access after a few days and lemmy.world was open so made an account there. Not much else to it.
This is pretty much the answer. The number of people who actually made the decision based on “reasons” is very few.
Exactly this. I tried numerous times on lemmy.ml and never got an email back for the verification, so I just gave up. World is the next logical choice. Since beehaw is already defederating, if you’re coming to the fediverse, joining an instance that’s already isolating itself, even if it has good reasons, doesn’t seem appealing. So lemmy.world it is. Tho here I am using my kbin mostly because then I have kbin, mastodon, and Lemmy integration all in one.
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Same here!
I was overwhelmed by the options of instances. Then Reddit is Fun had a pop up message suggesting to go to lemmy.world. I trusted Reddit is Fun so I followed its suggestion.
Plus it’s easier to say and communicate “lemmy world”
Funny how a lot of us originally found Reddit through watermarks on pics on Ebaum’s World. Maybe worth flooding reddit with pics watermarked lemmy.world
Someone should make a bot that randomly scrapes Reddit main subs to seed articles on here. Just to get more content. I have been doing so manually using old Reddit occasionally.
That being said, even in the last week I been seeing a great deal of more content. Now would like to see more communities.
I’ve unsubscribed from a couple of communities that did that. They were flooded with content that no one would discuss.
Already available; you can request subs at [email protected]. The lemmit.online instance is dedicated to replicating content over. It’s awesome.
Genius
I open today rif accidently and it started to work again. Logged out mind you. Got a weird message with instructions to log back into my Reddit account. Was able to browse Reddit as a guest on the meanwhile. Didn’t want to log back in as fuck Reddit.
Did rif sell to Reddit? Couldn’t blame him if he did but all the same I am leaving. Just can’t see how rif would still work without Reddit owning his servers. Anyone know what is going on?
Reddit wasn’t interested in buying any of the 3rd party apps. Since you know, apparently they’re so great at making apps that there were a dozen third party ones that people preferred.
I don’t know, but it might be that Reddit is only limiting API keys for authenticated sessions. That way the anonymous requests still work up to the free API rate limits.
I was overwhelmed by the options of instances. Then Reddit is Fun had a pop up message suggesting to go to lemmy.world. I trusted Reddit is Fun so I followed its suggestion.
I open today rif accidently and it started to work again. Logged out mind you. Got a weird message with instructions to log back into my Reddit account. Was able to browse Reddit as a guest on the meanwhile. Didn’t want to log back in as fuck Reddit.
Did rif sell to Reddit? Couldn’t blame him if he did but all the same I am leaving. Just can’t see how rif would still work without Reddit owning his servers. Anyone know what is going on?
[emphasis mine]
If anything, it sounds like rif sold to lemmy.world.
Lemmy.ml are tankies anyway so, good
Regardless of the how, I think it’s really cool that the top instance isn’t run by the devs. Really shows off the power and appeal of decentralized services.
