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.
And if you’re not following server news, even if you know the very basics of federation, it’s easy to miss defederations and subsequently never know you’re not seeing content you wanted to see.
Personally, I’m very interested in seeing a true representation of top posts. I’ll need a client that can let me login to multiple instances or a server that’s never the federated from anybody. One risk here is I could recommend Lemmy to someone, they could register on a different instance, and assume I like content I in fact don’t.
Tip: just learned I can see federated and blocked instances at /instances (e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/instances ).