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.
What do you think people are not understanding?
I wanted an account on a Lemmy instance, and Lemmy.world is one. Since then, I've been pleased with most of what the admins are doing with it.
And they haven't gotten bored and abandoned the instance like a lot of the smaller ones have gone.
On the other hand, I see a few times a week some people saying that they only browse communities on their instance because they don't want to create accounts on every instance, and they cannot use their credentials on other instances.
It's one of the reasons why we set the default to 'all' instead of 'local' on LW
Hello!
This might be the number one thing I see often.