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 think you misunderstood their comment? They’re saying the high number of active users coming from Reddit was too much for the computers to handle at the time, not that the Redditors themselves were scaring people away. The speed and downtime of the .ml instance at the time is what they are saying drove people to .world.
I remember world was a bit better at the time, but both instances were frequently struggling with performance after the third-party app ban.
Oh, yeah, if that’s what they meant, I do remember that. The biggest struggle was that the software was itself a bit rough, as (admittedly) a refugee myself, which to the admin’s credit has gotten much better.