this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I was really surprised by this too but yeah, people want to be on the same largest instance. I guess it's a community feeling by doing that. Or at least a feeling of safety, since it's unlikely the instance shuts down.
In addition to a large instance being less likely to shut down and (presumably) having more resources, there's an additional advantage to being on a larger instance: you have a more comprehensive "All" feed. Since federation with a remote feed isn't established until (IIRC) someone subscribes to it, an instance with a larger user base should contain more subscriptions to a wider variety of content. Of course, not everyone will like that and you lose out on Beehaw content if you're on the two largest Lemmy instances, but I think it applies in general.
At this point, I don't believe lemmy.world will shut down. But the constant outages are going to push people away regardless. Luckily people have nearly limitless options of instances to join.
Though, the average schmo just recently coming from Reddit won't understand "Instances" or "federation", and just give up on Lemmy as a platform overall once they see how unstable it is. lemmy.world is currently the front-door to the fediverse for a lot of people here.