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The core devs have always been pretty open about how they don't want lemmy.ml to be "the flagship instance". To them, it's just the instance that they run, and so happens to have the history of being the biggest instance back when lemmy was growing its user base.

They actively encouraged new/other instances be created and pushed new users during the reddit migration to other instances, rarely listing their own instance in the list of recommended instances on join-lemmy.

So it's not the flagship, and intentionally so. And while lemmy.world is the biggest by far, it is also arguably not the flagship either due to the lack of having the core devs or contributors as admins of that instance. All of which means lemmy has done something most other platforms have struggled with (I'm looking at you mastodon.social!), which is flattening the power structure amongst the devs and admins such that there is no real flagship, an all around good thing IMO.

60

To be fair to Mastodon, most of the things I tend to be interested in with it have at least made it to Fosstodon which is thriving pretty well.

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- I'm not sure what you're referring to actually by "made it to Fosstodon". Both mastodon.social and fosstodon would be running the same software, unless fosstodon are running some sort of fork which would make sense.
  
  I was referring to how mastodon.social is by the largest mastodon instance (like it's not even close) and is run by the mastodon group/company itself who have control over the software, app, joinmastodon.org web page etc. That's getting pretty centralised.
  
  Case in point, around May mastodon altered their mobile apps to set mastodon.social as the default server for creating a new account. Since then basically all new mastodon accounts have been only on mastodon.social. Now making the server selection process easier for newcomers makes a lot of sense, but it didn't need to be done in a way that both highlighted and amplified the already notable centralisation. At the time a bunch of people got upset and pointed out alternatives. But mastodon the company didn't say anything and of course there wasn't anything anyone could do. And now, mastodon.social grows by about the same size of the next biggest english speaking mastodon instance every couple of months and no one likes to talk about it because they can't do anything. By reasonable approximations, the fediverse is mastodon, and mastodon is becoming mastodon.social.
  
  Numerically, by Monthly Active Users (MAUs) mastodon is ~85% of the fediverse, and mastodon.social is ~25% of all of mastodon, or, ~22% of all of the fediverse. (See fedidb)
  
  Something like that happening with lemmy seems less likely, even far less likely, just because of the flatter power dynamics.
  
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There is no main instance, that's the whole point

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No. lemmy.ml used to be the biggest instance with the most communities originating there. (And the instance launched by the developers.) It has been the flagship instance. But it's a thing of the past. Just have a look at the statistics. For example here or here. The biggest instance currently is lemmy.world with about 5 times the active users. And since the reddit exodus, most of the active communities have been opened on other instances.

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It's run by the devs. That's it. It is neither the largest nor the most engaging instance - but at least updates are done pretty quick.

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For better or for worse (obligatory remark on how in a federated model there should be no “main” or “flagship” instance) that would probably be lemmy.world on the sheer number of users alone?

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The creators of lemmy run .ml. Its very existence is the basis of all others. From what I can tell, ml is also self hosted. Most likely by one of the devs. So like, right now, this conversation is getting passed around on his computer in a closet somewhere. Think about that. Yeah, .ml will always be the main instance regardless of how anyone thinks about it.

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Meh, most memes are in lemmy.ml. Memes are kinda important to some people in social platforms.

Edit: Hmm... pitchforks are very popular in this thread... interesting...

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- Just curious, how old are you?
  
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- Memes only matter if you're 14, unfortunately. Based on the number of comments and users, I'd say lemmyworld is the default.
  
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- Anecdotally in my local instance feed the most memes are coming out of blahaj's 196 and World's Lemmy Shitpost
  
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