I don’t understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
For me honestly mostly the name. World. Seems like a default instance to me. What does ml even mean?
I also chose mine because the name (haha funny ArchLinux meme - iusearchlinux.fyi) . But also because it didn’t sound like a default instance.
Main reason is, you gotta spread the load, the original purpose of federation is to share the costs so we can keep things affordable and prevent enshittification - not to dump it all on one instance, otherwise we might as well just turn Lemmy into a monolithic structure like Reddit, like YouTube, like Facebook, like Instagram, like Twitter and so on and so forth. We don’t want to outgrow donation funding. And we don’t want to make one instance “too big to block” lest it starts to enshittify or get greedy and gain too much power over the rest.
In my opinion, no instance should ever be considered the “default” of any federated platform.
The name absolutely matters. Federation blah blah doesn’t matter what instance blah blah and all that.
But regular people will flock to a “normal” or “official” sounding name and url. I won’t be surprised if lemmy.world becomes the defacto instance
Yeah going forward I’m going to just recommend lemmy.world to people, straight to the point and avoid a lot of the confusion over what instance to pick
