How did Lemmy.world become more popular than Lemmy.ml?
How did Lemmy.world become more popular than Lemmy.ml?
I don't understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
How did Lemmy.world become more popular than Lemmy.ml?
I don't understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
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.
And ml is?
The top level domain of the Metherlands
Motherland if I'm not mistaken.
I joined because lemmy.sdf.org is often inaccessible. And also because lemmy.sdf.org blocked lemmy.world, so why not go straight to the source?
Seconded
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.
Same. Like the parent of a child grown up, RIF has been forced to let us go, but not without influencing our direction lol
My exact reason. Had the popup show.
Then I created my own instance
I was already playing around with Lemmy, and after a few weeks I checked back into RIF and saw his post, so I came over to .World.
Does any of that make you think it's SUPPOSED to be new user friendly?
They don't have to be. They also don't have to be federated.
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.
Lemmy.ml had sign ups closed. Behaw required a short story or something to get accepted. Lemmy.world was accepting sign-ups wasn't hosted somewhere shady and had active communities. It was a pretty easy choice. Assuming the admins have a pledge drive or something to host on AWS/GCP so we can get better burst capabilities I'd love to donate.
Donations to keep the lemmy.world instance up-and-running can be made through:
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld or https://patreon.com/mastodonworld
@ruud does good work, and he's a HELL of a good admin. I'd recommend that we all contribute in order to have a place to gather. I've been looking at the various solutions to the Reddit conundrum and, personally, I think that lemmy.world is our best bet at this point...
EDIT: I have no affiliation; I just think that we should pay it back however we can. It costs money to run servers and, even if we just "buy him a coffee," every little bit helps IMO.
@Ruud has been great and Lemmy.world has very transparent so I will throw some cash their way. The mastodon.world blog is transparent with costs and financials which I appreciate.
I would love to see if they have a roadmap of how they plan to address the current surge of traffic or if they plan to just wait it out with their current VPS.
@Ruud has been great and Lemmy.world has very transparent so I will throw some cash their way. The mastodon.world blog is transparent with costs and financials which I appreciate.
I would love to see if they have a roadmap of how they plan to address the current surge of traffic or if they plan to just wait it out with their current VPS.
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
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.
Not to mention that signups on .ml is closed so you can't join anyway
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 joined world before I knew what an instance was. When the RIF app shut down, the developer recommended lemmy.world. I honestly, thought it was a single website.
Samesies
Happens when you are one of the few allowing signups while others are blocking them.
For me honestly mostly the name. World. Seems like a default instance to me. What does ml even mean?
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
That's why I went there as well. Seemed like the default.
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.
lol same
That and beehive whatever sounded like a niche community and not a good launching point
Marxism–Leninism (at least that's what I made of it after hearing about the admins being tankies)
.world is a catchy top-level domain
It's true. Before I migrated to lemmy.ca, I first subscribed to lemmy.world thinking it was the "official" instance.
They were also running on a beefier server. On my first week I tried several instances, but lemmy.world was the most consistently up that was also in jerboa.
it's fitting too since Lemmy is soon gonna take over the world
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.
Signups were also open and easier on Lemmy.world
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.
I signed up on lemmy.ca but their sublemmys aren't as populated as here. Plus jerboa let's me pick different instances.
I too do not know shit about fuck.
LOL Reminds me of how Chlamydia sounds like a beautiful name for a baby girl.
Ya it has a great domain name and didn't require an email when I signed up at least. I'm thinking about spinning up my own instance on AWS though since the lag and "bad gateway" stuff is annoying.
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.
Well put! I'm still very confused about "instances," and the way people talk about them makes it seem like you need to sign up for each one? But that can't be right, that would be way too confusing! Right? Lol.
Lemmy.world also seems like the best place to ask questions. Everyone I've encountered has been very helpful, and I see a lot of people talking about how positive the community is. So I'm trying to just sit back and enjoy the ride!
Imagine phone companies. An instance is like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile or any other provider.
If you want to talk to your friends, it doesn't really matter what instance they're on.
A Verizon customer can still call a AT&T customer no problem. A Verizon customer doesn't need to also sign up for AT&T to do that. It all just.. works.
People talking about different instances is like people talking about different phone companies. "Verizon's coverage is better" or "T-Mobile has better support" or that kinda thing.
I signed up on lemmy.ca yet you signed up on lemmy.world. We can interact though.
This community we are interacting on is in lemmy.world's instance but since our two instances are federated (work together like many others) we can interact in general and through any community in our instances or other instances that are federated with ours.
I see nobody else explained, so I might as well.
Each instance has their own users, communities and rules. A user can subscribe to any community on any instance that's not blocked. Sometimes it's important to know the rules of the instance the community is on, because different things are allowed.
If I'm a user on lemmy.srv.eco, for example, I can still subscribe to any lemmy.world community and post/comment/vote just like a lemmy.world user.
The only real downside of being on a smaller instance is that you'll have to do a bit more work actively subscribing to things. An instance only pulls in a community if at least one user subscribes to it. On a big server, your all is very full of communities as there are more people subscribing to more diverse things. On a smaller instance, you'll need to do that yourself.
The advantage of being on a smaller instance is that with less load on the server, it'll work much faster.
Fellow Dunce here, exact same thought process for me.
Not sure what's a dunce, but I guess I'm one too as I concur
Similar for me -- but add onto it, when I joined, lemmy.world was the only one of the top 3 most populated instances (with lemmy.ml and beehaw) that had open registration
My leading theory is that both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml were in a list of 5+ “recommended” communities, and “world” is the only recognizable word that implies all-inclusivity. And now that the world population is so high, more people will assume that is the “default/correct” community.
I joined world because I figured it was a global community, and did not want to limit myself before I even knew what I was joining into. I may end up making 2 or 3 accounts just to have access to separate, possibly defederated, communities.
When I saw the Lemmy posts making the rounds on Reddit it was all for Lemmy.World, probably why its getting more pop.
I have active accounts in other instances to mimic the multi functionality, where I joined different communities.
this is spot on. that's exactly how it went for me and probably most others.
lemmy.world is defederated from beehaw, which is why I'm not on it.
I chose Lemmy.ee largely because they are federated with every major instance.
Precisely why I may end up with a multi-Lemmy
They weren't selective about who is joining (unless people were absolute douches) and the community is pretty much nice to get along with.
When I was joining ~a month ago the situation was very different
I tried lemmy.one - had some issues joining
I saw beehaw.org - no downvotes - not my jam
I saw lemmygrad.ml - too political for my tastes
I saw sopuli.xyz - most of local posts and server maintenance posts were in language I don't speak - maybe I can find something fitting me more?
I saw lemmy.world - small but not looking like private, in Europe, so pings should be ok and description seemed fine
I also saw lemmy.ml - seemed like the main instance with the most users - having some understanding of federation from Mastodon migration I decided to spread the load...
And here we are :D
Beehaw defederates like it's going out of style, Lemmy.ml doesn't allow criticism of the CCP. Lemmy.world seems much more stable and neutral.
Alright guys the software has this defederate feature, now you do you but I suggest thinking of it like a break-glass-in-ca--
<Beehaw swings hammer>
Same here!
Any lemm.ee gang?
I joined lemm.ee, but on my first day (3 days ago) lemm.ee was having significant issues with basic things like image upload or creating a community. Because of that, I moved over to lemmy.world "temporarily", but now I have more content here and am likely to just stay. I would have liked to have been on a smaller instance though for sure.
Yeah I feel ya, I have an account on the lemmy.world instance too. I feel like lemm.ee is faster in general, but the image upload limit does suck for this instance
I have an account on .world but lemm.ee is a great name and the admin who runs the instance sounds like a cool guy. Plus .world is already way overloaded so I was looking for another instance.
I've been here for almost a month now, lemm.ee represent
I joined lemm.ee to see beehaw content again (and to take load off of .world) and all of the posts in hot and active are .world anyway. Oh well.
Represent
Probably because its name sounds official and it allows quick registration while others need approval (some never approves you).
Turns out it’s the right choice as the admin seems very active in updates and fixes. Lemmy.world also has a more chill homey vibes. At least that’s what I observed so far.
As someone signing up for lemmy.world, my reasons were:
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.
Sync for Reddit suggested it, so here I am.
Same here!
in my case I couldn't sign up to ML it just kept timing out. this one didn't.
When Lemmy.ml was still on top I initially tried to sign up and was unable to. They could not handle the influx when the first migration occurred during the blackout days.
Lemmy.world on the other hand worked just fine.
during the blackout days>
As a refugee, I feel like learning more about lemmy lore.
I think they mean the reddit blackout, so its shared history.
Same. I do like the communities in lemmy.ml but says I didn't answer questions and registration is closed now..oh well.
i checked out three or four instances and this one seemed to have the least amount of bullshit to deal with
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.
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
I came here from Apollo for Reddit. There’s a web app called wefwef that is a lemmy client that literally looks and works EXACTLY like Apollo. It even has apollo json import to find similar communities. Anyway, .world is the first server listed in the list so it’s where I registered.
I tried to sign up with Beehaw.org, but for some reason it was taking forever. So I came here and joined. TBH, I'm still getting the hang of this whole lemmy.
<whatever>
thing. lemmy.world seemed like a good option.RIF specifically directed me here. I didn't join one before that because I didn't know which one was "best". I honestly don't care which one I joined, I just wanted to be on the one everyone else is on. I know this mindset somewhat defeats part is the purpose of the federated communities. I don't care about that in the slightest I just want a clone of Reddit.
Also "world" sounds more generic/standard than ml. Most people probably think it's a military website or something.
You'll probably find 90%+ of casuals are in the same boat as me.
Ditto
Casual here, and had the exact same situation lol.
I read several guides that suggested .world, that's it.
By keeping sign-ups open, mostly.
Lemmy.ml, to my understanding, was always meant to be a pilot instance from the devs of lemmy. Beehaw is kind of its own forum. There is also sh.itjust.works, but that has been caught up in some federation drama, and I don't think people like the name. Lemmy.world has been the right server at the right time to absorb everyone and I guess they have been able to keep up with sign-ups. Kudos to them.
federation drama
Not really. We had a thedonald community for like 5 hours before it was banned, and a tiny number of people started shouting about how terrible we are because we don't read the minds of people joining.
Also, we're trying to run this instance democratically, and the first vote is a pretty easy no-brainer: defederate a hate speech instance. Not really "drama" as much as everyone has an opinion.
You can check out the discussion on the agora, the vast majority of the discussion is very respectful.
EDIT: Discussion I'm talking about is here.
I'm talking about on other instances, who are trying to figure out if they are defederating.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it sounded the most “official”.
Paradoxal regarding Lemmy.ml is the founder's instance 😁🫠
I found a massive table of all the lemmy instances that allowed me to sort by features that were important to me. Does the community allow up/down voting, does it allow NSFW, does it allow porn? How many communities has it defederated with?
lemmy.world ticked all the boxes that were important to me.
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.
Rif sent me to lemmy.world to make an account. Didnt know the deal here and still kinda iffy but im getting the idea.
Just think of each separate site (AKA 'instances', like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works) as different competing versions of Reddit. All with their own different subreddits.
The key difference though is that these instances are all partnered together ('federated') because they are running on the same technology so you can see posts from the other instances.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. If I understand correctly, it functionally shouldn't matter which instance you use, because the experience is supposed to be the same across them all?
Does it matter that I'm on world? Is there a reason I might prefer a different instance? Something I'm missing?
I don't know man, I'm here because shit just works.
Rif user here. When then 429s started I clicked on the RIF announcements part of the app which had a link to lemmy.world - and here I am.
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
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.
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 love how World and Blahaj are lgbt friendly and anti authoritarianism, unlike .ml.
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.
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.
It's decidedly not hosted in malaysia. I'm also unclear why that would be a problem though.
At the time I signed up Lemmy.World was pretty small, I just wanted an instance that wasn't .ml and had better policies... As it turned out the modlog is very transparent and they were deleting posts critical of the CCP/Russia. So I left and made an account on World.
It seems World was a good choice... Although now that it struggles with the amount of users it seems it might be worth setting an alt up on another instance just to help me out when it gets too busy over here.
Not sure tbh but I do love the Instance I found. Great community it seems and GREAT domain.
A reddit user made a list of alternative services for reddit. The list was .world, .ml and bee. At this point i didn't know it's the same decentralised service. I picked the first one, liked it and made an account after a few days.
I have an account on .world but lemm.ee is a great name and the admin who runs the instance sounds like a cool guy. Plus .world is already way overloaded so I was looking for another instance.
Lemmy.ml are tankies anyway so, good
Ml sounds like short for make love to me, and world is pretty cool domain name.
Mother Lover.
For me, all lemmy.world communities I subscribed was totally blocked on my beehaw.org account, so I create another account on lemmy.world.
The goodbye message on RIF pointed to lemmy.world so that's why I'm here.
Lemmy.ml basically shut up shop, redirecting people to other instances, because they were struggling, and the developers never really intended it to be as big as an instance as it has become.
Their registrations are still closed, so even if you wanted to join, that is not possible at the moment.
I wasn’t able to signup to lemmy.ml the best for me was to signup on lemmy.world and I get my journey started 😃
Same
I left Beehaw because the defederated from instances where half my communities were at. Ended up on Lemmy world because they had my favorites.
At this point I don’t know how I got here and where I’m going and I’m too afraid to ask
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.
Shit just works, yo.
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
My favorite subreddit migrated to Lemmy.world so that's how it happened with me.
I went with lemmy.one, did I err?
Honestly, with how fritzy the top few instances have been due to the recent traffic, I'd argue you did the opposite of err.
lemmy.ml really lagged in the early days and the first post on lemmy.world was /u/Ruud bragging about new hardware and how it’s all running smoothly with the influx
This was my reasoning. Sounded like .ml was having trouble and lemmy.world was advertising their upgraded server and seemed to working good so it's what I went with.
Does it matter which server your account is? Asking because I am a NooB. Or nOOb? 🤔🙄
Not really - it only matters if the instance where you have your account (e.g. lemmy.world, in your case) is not federated with another instance (e.g., beehaw.org).
As long as your instances are federated, you'll be able to see everything on the other instance and vice versa.
There are weird states, such as instance A being federated to instance B but B not being federated to A. This means that users on A can see, comment, and (potentially? I think?) create posts for communities on B but no other instance (B, C, or otherwise) can see those comments/posts.
it was the first instance i found when searching. i think it was a reddit post. so maybe world was more promoted on bigger reddit subs?
Lemmy.world allows creating communities, where as lemmy.ml doesn't. For me that was a big reason why I moved from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world. (I made this account after beehaw defederated lemmy.world. I would have made this my default account, but sadly there still seems to be some communication issues between instances. I have some communities on lemmy.world, but I don't see the content sync properly here.)
Beehaw unlinked from Lemmy.world? Yeah will have to go smoke my beehaw account then if I can.
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?
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.
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.