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 dumb naive. 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.
