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 [email protected]), 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 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.
As @Masimatutu points out, for a community on another instance, you normally only see the subscriber count of people from your own instance who are subscribed there, which can make other instances look smaller than they are.
I think you are right. Kbin now has multi-communities called Collections, and it’s a bit of a gamechanger.
We can make our own and/or follow other people’s public multis on various topics. I am now seeing so much more content from way more instances.
You can see global active users and local subscribers, which is enough for me, since people on my instace are more likely to have the same interests. If I need global stats, though, there is https://browse.feddit.de/
Remote access of other communities is a smoldering mess. You have to hope the community you want to subscribe to shows up in All or you have to know its name and use the search feature. There’s no way to see another instance’s communities, unless you have an account there, which is a huge problem because you have to go through the huge hassle of signing up for an instance just so you can find the community, and oh yeah, most instances aren’t even open to invitation so it’s not even possible in a lot of cases.
Also if you get banned from a community it force-unsubscribes you, and if you get banned from an instance it won’t even tell you.