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”.
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 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.
Just to precise, it’s still the case
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.
Well, I hear that but at the same time the counterargument seems fairly strong. As I understand it (not being a mod of any communities here myself) apparently the mod tools suck pretty bad, especially across instance barriers. And in particular it is reportedly lacking standard filtering capabilities so that if Threads were ever federated with, the sheer VOLUME of content would quickly overwhelm the ability of the mods to keep up. Hence, if Threads were to join the Threadiverse, then Lemmy as it currently is now would have no chance but would cease to exist, almost instantly. And we would become an unmoderated playground.
I have no idea how Threads itself handles moderation, but at a guess, it wouldn’t (fully?) apply if people with Threads accounts were to comment on posts in Lemmy communities?
So Threads really is a special circumstance, not at all like federating with hexbear or exploding heads etc.
Even so, the admins do seem to be listening to the feedback of the users, rather than forcing that choice upon everyone, yeah:-).