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.

Its an incredibly pro US biased instance despite not being hosted in the US and having a .world domain.

Greatest hits are politics@lemmy.world forbidding non-US topics and of course news@lemmy.world and its bias check bot according to which every non US media is left wing biased.

It's a battle of political ideologies.

ml is administered by the creators of Lemmy, they are openly socialist/communist/tankie depending on your own ideology, ml was chosen to represent Marxism-Leninism, and so the people it attracted are generally also adhering to this kind of ideologies.
.world was created for Redditors exile, as such, it is mostly center-left to social democrat.

Political extremists tend to extremise everything, typically a tankie will call you a Nazi/fascist if you disagree with them. That's one of your answer.

Secondly, some ml people are frustrated that Lemmy is not their own little thing anymore for them and their friends, as world is the biggest instance now by far. So they show some kind of instance-xenophobia, not much different from the Great Replacement theory: "we are being culturally replaced through mass migration".

Not all .ml people are like that of course. In my experience, it is enough to block a few tankies to get back to civilized discussions.

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

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.

lemmyworld in many ways is still just reddit. don't get me wrong, I've talked to plenty of cool people on there before. but it is the biggest instance that ballooned after the API controversy and a lot of them seem to have just brought Reddit to the fediverse with them. I have no issues with any mods there, I've not really seen them at all. they did defed a community from my instance though so that's pretty lame of them.

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 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.

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.”

Some of the dumbest and most aggressive comments I've seen on Lemmy came from lemmy.world. Most comments on it seem OK, but it does have a reddit-like flavour with a good number of unpleasant users.

What's wrong with punching nazis?

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

.world runs into issues because it's overwhelmingly liberal and the mods are anti-Marxist on a platform built by Communists and dominated by leftists in general. They also defederated from the major Marxist instances. Lemmy.world is largely a replication of Reddit as well, so people leaving Reddit also don't necessarily want that either.

It's also by far the largest instance, not necessarily in a good way. It tends to dominate the fediverse and thus their mods and admins have an outsized voice, even if federation helps combat that issue.

Plenty of people like Lemmy.world, you'll get different answers if you asked on another community like Lemmy.ml's AskLemmy.

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

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.

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

I usually beef with sh.it.just.works users because by far I've met the most wrong takes there, especially in WPT, and it's quite funny considering the instance name conveys a sort of desperation in not being able to get Lemmy to work, which just makes it seem like it's an instance for the less intellectualy gifted of us, but it's all in good fun really. Some communities there are also quite nice.

I'm pretty aligned with hexbears/MLs but their Russia simping is too much, whether it's critical support or trying to get a reaction out of folks to post the pig it just feels like a nazi bar type situation.

Ironically db0 and slrpnk feel far more legit to me as an anarchist though neither are explicitly anarchist or based around being leftist in any other way.

Blahaj.zone banned me for transphobia on my first post I think. Or one of the communities did. No idea what I said there but I totally get them not messing around with bans.

World is just the largest instance, so naturally has the most trolls, spam, dodgy mods with weird rules and so on and so forth.

That's the beauty of the fediverse though, if they ever became a real problem for me I'd just block em all. I kind of love this instance culture. Makes the place feel more human than the cold masto bullshit.

Are people really starting to hate on 50% of the lemmy population because of their instance?

You betcha buddy. Joking. For myself, at least.

Idk what's going on with Flying Squid, but a lot of the trolls accounts I see are from .world so people are probably starting to associate that instance with those kinds of people.