At the time, LW was among the only ones that could handle the influx of registrations.

So naturally, it became the default one, as people would want to get on the biggest one, similar to a way the biggest Mastodon instance is very prevalent.

People were also afraid their All feed won't be as full if they were not on LW.

Nowadays I think the repartition is a bit better, and most of the top communities have at least an equivalent out of LW.

Since nobody mentioned it, I will. It has a cool, short and easy to remember name.

Curb appeal and convenience are extremely powerful drivers of human behavior. Moreso than time-consuming, complex, rational processing in a world of nearly infinite options.

I think there are two big reasons...

• During the big Reddit exodus, a lot of people were recommending lemmy.world.
• It's a general purpose instance. People tend to flock to those rather than more specific topical instances.

I joined .world when there were only about 100 of us (was trying to find a nice small server to settle on, so much for that!), and rolled up my sleeves and went full-time tech support for like 2 weeks to help with the influx. So from that pov:

• When the Reddit exodus started (slightly earlier than people had anticipated), .world was one of the only instances that didn't require a proper application to join.
• There was a bug where acceptance emails weren't being delivered to Gmail addresses (probably some others too but for obvious reasons Gmail was noticed first). That meant people waiting for their applications to be accepted on other servers didn't realise they had been. As well as this some people were just impatient waiting in general so gave up on their original instance choice and joined .world instead.
• Other instances also started to close registrations completely due to not being able to handle the scaling. World wasn't handling it great but Ruud specifically announced he wouldn't be closing signups, which is one of the reasons it became the default recommendation while everything was on fire.
• There was a thread tracking how quickly we were growing, I remember us celebrating 1000 users and then a couple weeks later 100,000! And that was kind of exciting so I can't blame people for wanting to be part of it.

The best part is, I was the one who reported the Gmail thing to Ruud after seeing the admins of another instance had figured out a fix. I remember saying it was good we'd noticed it now, before the influx "next week" (ie Reddit's scheduled meltdown). Turned out, he had no idea that was about to happen at all and the timing of setting up .world was just a total coincidence! 😆

Edit: This was only like six months ago and recounting the tale to all you whippersnappers is making me feel like an old grandma telling tales of the war.

I joined because it didn't require jumping through any hoops to join and was featured prominently on the join-lemmy website.

Just to be clear, Beehaw defederated LW and many others because they allowed for open sign ups.

Essentially it was because it was one of a small number of instances that had open signups without having to write an application (no matter how simple). Reducing the friction of getting an account and starting to use the site is more important than you would think.

Once it is popular then that is the one people will recommend since that is the instance they are familiar with.

I chose it because it sounds general, honestly. Joining a more specific sounding instance just seemed kind of arbitrary and confusing. I love Star Trek, but I still don't want that to always appear with my name, for example.

I tried for 2 months to join all kinds of instances and they were all silent & unresponsive. .world is the only one that responded and finally worked.

I think the big thing is not having any requirements to join, you just make an account and you're in. I started out trying to join a different instance and the second I saw a list of questions to answer I noped out and came here.

For the same reason cities form: the larger they get the more benefit there is to being there, so they keep getting larger.

I like the federation model and have switched from twitter/reddit to mastodon/lemmy. Still, we should expect and plan for massive instances, because of their inherent advantages. (More users = more content, more referrals to new users. Lower cost per user in terms of servers/resources)

Ultimately what I'd like to see are democratically run instances. Right now each server is essentially a benevolent dictatorship, which is fine when they're small and/or you don't have much invested in an account. Once they start to get big and making a change is a lot of work, it becomes more problematic.

Social.coop on mastodon is cool, however not necessarily geared to scale. I think if there was a multi-stakeholder coop where employees can make a living and users get input on how it's run, that could really take off.

it is not clear what your expectation is, tho: should people somehow magically load balance between unknown alternatives? What exactly is the point beside 'big is bad'?

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.

I first joined lemmy.world during the exudus because it was the most recommended one. Soon after, dropped it and joined lemmy.zip. My reason was world's uptime issue, going dark because of constant DDoS attacks (not their fault) and the last straw for me was the ban of piracy community. I love lemmy.zip, they don't ban instances or communities unless it absolutely warrants in which case the mods reached out to members for vote. Another big reason I love zip is because the mods are very chill and don't overstep. I haven't had any technical issue with zip.

Many (relatively) smaller instances have a target audience. When you are new and don't want to get "locked in", a general instance feels just right. That's how I chose mine.

Because it's hipster reddit, making it twice as insufferable as normal reddit

Simply because people didn’t and still don’t understand how all of this works.

Because the main general purpose instance(.ml)'s server was dying under the influx of redditoids

The one I wanted to join literally had a notice on the sign up page saying that they didn't accept email addresses from my host. The one I joined before .world collapsed under the weight of the Reddit migration a couple of days into Spez's meltdown and still hasn't come back. .world turned out to be stable and well-built enough for me to actually stick around.

Lemmy needs something like the Mastodon server covenant, I think.

@Masimatutu Mander is where many of the cool science communities are though. :-)

I also feel like it goes against the idea of the Fediverse that one instance has control over most of the platform.

I agree. But I think what has happened is people are bringing a web 2.0 social media mentality to the fediverse. Instead of adjusting to decentralization/federation they are essentially trying to recreate centralization by clustering in the one spot.

Lemmy.world's size and low friction signup became self-perpetuating for people who thought they were going "where everyone else is" and were afraid of missing out.

As the fediverse matures, I think we will see less obsession with recruitment or with needing to be the biggest/only community for whatever subject.

One of the other advantages of LW is that it's run from the EU and thus has to comply with the GDPR. Given all the shit that Reddit pulled during the exodus, this may have been an additional reason for people to choose LW over one of the North American instances.

I think part of the issue stems from Lemmy not having a good way of tracking a topic / community defined on multiple instances, so you have to track a community on each instance. People want the most active one, so they track the one on LW since it has the most members. And since they track mostly communities on LW it also makes sense to just use LW as the primary.

If Lemmy could have some inbuilt support for tags or subscribing to a topic / multi-instance community, I think people could feel less inclined of defaulting to the largest instance.

Mostly just open applications. Though others are extremely easy to join.

Defaultitis.