Thanks for asking this btw. Just found it with a quick search wondering the same thing after reading yet another comment section (this one about Trump, Musk and JD Vance) that turned into 50% whinging about .world mods/admin and horrible reddit users turning their lemmy into a shithole. The answers you got here were really helpful for me to understand a bit more about the context/history of these spaces.

.world is the biggest instance and therefore a prime choice for trolls to create accounts. Most of the trash posts I’ve seen lately are from brand new users on lemmy.world

I am equally suspicious of brand new lemmy.world users as I am of veterans of lemmy.ml. Older accounts on .world are usually pretty normal.

Imo the best mods/admins are the ones I don’t have to interact with and oh boy did I interact with the admins of .world

Because the pedantic shit that the socialist get away with in .ml, Hexbear, and Lemmygrad doesn’t fly here. And because of this, they accuse .World of bias while completely ignoring the fact that their own instances ban people for simply being “liberal.”

A lot of this boils down to consequences of lemmy.world being the largest instance: typical Reddit users beeline for it, trolls go there, larger comms so more frequent issues with moderation, people who fail to distinguish between “we shouldn’t concentrate our activity into the largest instance” and “largest instance bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD TO LE KNEE KIND STRANGER!”, so goes on.

I have nothing against the wolders but the admins of that instance raise more than a few eyebrows. Particularly when they rolled back specific anti hate speech policies in favor of vague common sense ones to stay ahead of the anti-woke crowd.

Kind of feels like they have been trying to take over Lemmy. Which… Could be a lot worse but still rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t hate LW, I even regularly post to a few LW communities. The sysadmins do a good job. There are a few debatable moderation decisions, but those are usually documented on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

The main issues I have with it is

• centralization of communities coupled with the current federation implementation creating 7-days delay for instance like aussie.zone (see !fedimemes@feddit.uk for a meme and discussion on that topic)
• their communities being the default means they can take controversial decisions and impact a topic for everyone until an alternative community emerges. See all the debates with the Media Bias Fact Checker bot, which in the end got removed from !world@lemmy.world (!globalnews@lemmy.zip for an alternative) but apparently it still on !politics@lemmy.world
• another consequence of centralization is impact of their being unavailable. People here might remember August 2023 when LW was under consistent DDoS attack, it was barely usable. This prevented a third of Lemmy total users to use Lemmy. Should they face a similar issue in the future, most of the Lemmy communities would be unusable.

Another point I haven’t seen mentioned is that they are still federated with Threads: https://fedipact.veganism.social/

They are the last large instance which still is.

I’d say the biggest criticism is that it’s the largest instance, and is also a “general purpose” instance, which sort of takes away from the main goal of the fediverse. When 90% of content comes from one instance, it opposes the goal of decentralization.

I chose lemdro.id because it’s nice and fast, the admins are very good, and its main topic is around technology/software which I like

What’s wrong with punching nazis?

Also, just thinking about it, but OP, you are posting this on a LW community, while people really disliking LW probably blocked the instance. You could maybe crosspost to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml to get additional answers

I don’t find any issues on .world. Yeah some people say dumb stuff, but that’s just the world isn’t it? I am sure there are others who think the same of me. It’s whatever, some people getting mad at .world are just mad they’re not in an echo chamber.

But other people complaining about trolls are right, there’s just no place for that. Report, block and move on. It’s not your job to educate anyone.

someone comparing .world with .ml in politics

Everyone to the left of me is a psychotic delusion America-hating Tankie.

I’m a rational, centrist clear-eyed moderate making fact-based decisions using my extensive expertise on the subject matter.

Everyone to the right of me is a Russian bot or a troll.

I want you all to know that I’m happy you’re here, cis het white male frat boy from old wealth with an ivy league education or a neorospicy gay trans Jewish anarcho-communist and everything else out there.

While I won’t judge you on your instance, I will judge you on your ability to be a good neighbor. I’m always glad to see humility, kindness, empathy, comradery, etc. on display.

The instance structure conveniently groups people together and labels them. Stereotyping, bias and tribalism are the natural result.

Easy, because it’s often home to some extreme and often bizarre opinions. It often makes Reddit seem civil and intellectual.

In the last month alone, I’ve seen:

• Downvotes for suggesting that if you were to ask Big Tech to split, they’ll probably just split in a way that keeps them aligned, while cutting unprofitable chunks out.
• Downvotes for suggesting that TikTok shouldn’t be banned for being “stupid”, given that most social media is stupid, and people often said that about the shit that many of us grew up with.
• Just endless nonsense about how you cannot print with Windows, like at all, while Linux (never stating a distro) “just works”. It’s clear that so many people in the tech community on lemmy.world haven’t used Windows for years.
• Crap about LLM’s and how providers like OpenAI are “dumb”, despite the fact that many use grounding and expert systems to guide towards correctness (literally what I work on in my job).
• Being so US-centric AND contrarian that you regularly see posts around how “Europe is so much better for this”, when Europe is a fucking continent with separate countries and their own laws/customs.
• Posts about how we can get “normies” to use Lemmy

None of the above would happen on Reddit. They’re all signs of communities that are detached from reality, so much so that on Mastodon there are several posts from people that have called Lemmy (basically meaning the “main” instance) out as being toxic and unfriendly compared to other fediverse offerings.