Created on June 1 of this year, lemmy.world quickly grew to 51k users and then blew up after reddit’s API debacle on July 1, doubling to a whopping 100k in just 9 days later!
A lot of subreddits moved to Lemmy.world so in turn I think a lot of the reddit migration ended up here (myself included). Mastodon.world already had a large user base so it probably just made sense to rely on their new lemmy instance to handle the new users. Other instances like lemmy.ml sort of froze new signups at the time so that also funneled more users this way.
It was the first to throw some real money behind it’s server infrastructure. A month ago most Lemmy instances - even the “big” ones ran on $10 a month 2 vCPU VPSs.
There was another influx early in June when the API changes were announced but before the blackouts even happened.
Most instances with public signups started struggling but Lemmy.world launched and Ruud upgraded the server hardware almost daily to keep up.
Other instances even had to pause signups from time to time but world kept working and so gobbled up most signups on those days.
Once it got to be a top 3 instance and then top 2 and then first it became a self sustaining snowball as a lot of people chose the biggest instance by default.
At the beginning of the great migration, they got overwhelmed by troll harras accounts, that used lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works open registration to evade bans. A lot of vile stuff got posted (like photos of murdered drag queens). They decided to defederate from both instances temporarily until they have better mod tools. I don’t think it was necessary but they do that they think is the best for their community. At that point Beehaw had some of the best communities through and many people were angry to get kicked out for something that wasn’t their fault.
Its mostly because they defederated from lemmy.world. Meaning you dont really get to interact with them. You can see their posts and comments, they cant see yours.
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