I have seen many comments saying that lemmy.world sucks, and sh.itjust.works is good. I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances. Why? After a quick look, sh.itjust.works doesn’t look much different to me. Can anyone explain?
Edit: many good replies. the conclusion I’m drawing is that for my purposes it doesn’t really matter. I appreciate everyone who responded
The two main reasons people attack LW is:
people who criticise it because it is by far the largest instance, and thereby means lemmy isn’t as decentralised as it could be, I think this is a fair point, because it has caused federation issues with for example aussie.zone in the past.
Tankies who get mad the average lemmy.world user does not share their admiration for China, Russia, North Korea, Stalin, and Mao. Thereby accusing the whole instance of being “libs” and “bigots”.
I’ll add 2 more that resonate with me:
Fwiw, LW seems ready to defederate from Threads at a moment’s notice (post), but atm it doesn’t matter since Threads isn’t federating with Lemmy anyway.
Though it’s still an excellent point to wonder why they haven’t done it preemptively, like pretty much every other instance I’ve heard of (even lemm.ee’s [blocked instance list[(https://lemm.ee/instances) that is shockingly short has that one). Perhaps bc the decision to defederate from any instance, and especially that one, has generated such negative feedback (as the post linked above mentions), they are hesitant to do anything at all, especially again while it does not matter right now.
The way they approached Threads is part of why I stuck with LW. Instance location doesn’t matter much to me and why would I go with an option that is more willing to take choice out of my hands?
Corporate or not, it should be my decision to interact with it. Unless it’s Nazis or some shit similar, I can block rather than rely on defederation and being told what to do.
lemm.ee had a vote on threads. As to the short blocklist, it’s a combination of a liberal federation policy and sunaurus apparently taking the time to clean it up once in a while, other instances have instances on their blocklist which are long defunct.
Lemmy.world has kind of awful moderation, which means people who are trolls or bad actors have lived here for a very long time despite multiple reports. It was only recently that Linkerbaan (the most notorious one of all) was banned, and it took a thread complaining about bans in [email protected] and dbzer0 admins messaging them to get their attention.
There are other people here like that which never receive permanent bans for consistently horrible behavior. It’s not great, and while I don’t agree with Beehaw’s decision to defederate over it I do think that things could be better. It does degrade user experience to have known trolls and assholes running wild and only getting a slap on the wrist when they do something horrible.
Maybe people shouldn’t overflow the moderation pipe with reports then just because posts are idiotic. There’s the downvote button for that. I’m just a guy with a full-time job and personal life who on occasion may get ill with a cold or so. So when I log onto Lemmy on PC and I see a dozen of reports having popped up about posts being reported as being “in bad faith”, posts that may be genuinely idiotic but not containing any personal attacks / racism /…, I’m already checking out. Not every idiotic posts needs moderator intervention. Sometimes a minus 25 score is enough. So when there are a dozen of reports about merely idiotic posts, I might miss a genuinely intervention-worthy one.