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 !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com), 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 mean theyre trying to keep a chill and civl environment and the mods are volunteers who got tired of having to put up with a disproportionately large amount of comments from very specific instances. Since the mod tools they need in order to better handle this influx wasnt there they took the nuclear option. Something which they did not do lightly.
You can check out: https://beehaw.org/instances
and see they blocked a lot, but most of what they blocked was trash and they are federated with way more instances.
They do plan on leaving though. They predate the reddit bump by more than a year and they only wanted to be a smaller online community and not a reddit replacement and they havent been able to get the tools they need patched into lemmy.