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.

    • @[email protected]
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      297 months ago

      It’s an Ikea stuffed shark that’s become a mascot for trans people because it happens to be pink and blue. lemmy.blahaj.zone is an instance for LGBTQ folks.

      (I’m aware of this mainly because [email protected] often has content near the top of “all”, but I sometimes hesitate to comment on it because I don’t want to intrude.)

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        196 is its most popular community which sucks because their mods are rabid anti-communists, it’s a really bad look for the instance.

    • @UndercoverUlrikHD
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      87 months ago

      Blåhaj is the Swedish word for “blue shark” (blå haj). It’s the name of an IKEA plushie of a blue shark.

        • @UndercoverUlrikHD
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          57 months ago

          Other people that replied already explained that the colours of the plushie resembles the one the trans community uses, so it ended being a representation/icon or something of the trans community. I believe the owner of the instance is transgender, so there’s the connection.