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 [email protected]), 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.
I first joined lemmy.ml in 2020 but left because of its association with lemmygrad. Lemmy.world had good uptime, decent moderation (I never saw spam until last week), was largely uncontroversial (before blocking piracy at dbzer0), and was open when others closed their signups (that’s why Beehaw defederated).
However, things have mostly settled now, and we have multiple instances with capable staff, so you might wonder why the majority is still on Lemmy.world. I think the answer is simple, it’s still one of the standard recommendations, there is no large disadvantage to using lemmy.world over anything else and most importantly people can’t migrate their account to another instance after joining. I personally plan on continuing to use lemmy.world for the time being.
Just for reference, the recommended workaround to export the subs and block lists is https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
I’m aware of the workaround, but this is far from perfect. It does not redirect replies or comments as far as I’m aware.
I had a look at how Mastodon does it, it’s not that much fancier to be honest, just a “The account has moved”, and following the new account needs to be done manually by followers.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration
Edit: even the moving feature does not move the posts
I’m not aware of any federated service where complete migration is possible, do you have any in mind?
I was not aware Mastodon didn’t actually move the posts, that is quite disappointing.
To be fair, it has a lot of implications. Would your posts be reposted included the likes, reposts, replies, etc? The dependencies among this things can quickly get out of hand, especially in a federated context
Honestly it’s fine. I’ve moved a few times and the first time it was a bit sad, but once you realise it’s like five minutes later and you’re continuing the conversation you were having on your old account with all the same people on your new account the actual historical record suddenly seems a lot less important than the inherent coolness of what just happened :D
Your followers actually move automatically to the new account
Yeah before the reddit migration the top instances were lemmygrad and a far more stalinist friendly lemmy.ml . Beehaw was also there but beehaw didnt have open registration and the process also became bugged out around the time the expansion happened so people would write their application to join and get no notifications or anything that they were in. Also beehaw manually reviewed the accounts at the time so it was a slow process.
Other large instances also didnt want to become the largest one while .world wanted to grow at all costs. With open registration and didnt even require emails at first(which honestly reddit didnt either for a while, but reddit had better mod tools for its time)
No disadvantages? Idk, there is the whole disadvantage of .world being defederated from lemmygrad. :)