Hi!

I think it was the instance referenced in the RIF goodbye message. That's what got me here, anyway.

Because on the main Lenny website world shows up as recommended. The other recommended sites want users to put an email in addition to a write up on what they can offer. Which totally kills interest for any new people.

I think the main Lenny website is to blame here tbh. It pushing users towards a few preset instances that are not really new user friendly.

Some are not accepting sign ups at all.

Personally speaking, at the time I made this account it seemed one of the better open, general instances with a home domain that wouldn't be kinda clunky to tell others about. Folks I'd suggest this to wouldn't care about the shit just works jokey name, but they'd probably be a little annoyed at the whole sh dot itjust dot works formatting...Which even just saying that aloud kinda sucks.

If it were shit.just.works no big deal, but it's not, so lemmy.world is easier to write & say by comparison. That all said, even more important to me than the name was whether the admin had any experience running a federated server before for awhile, which lemmy.world's had via their hosting of mastodon.world, so I opted for this instance. There may have been other general instances at the time with similar experience that I overlooked tbh*, and I may still hop over to another at some point, but so far this one works decently enough to me.

*-I know of some "legacy" lemmy instances that kinda fit this description, like .ca or midwest.social, but I regarded those as more for folks from those areas, and Beehaw is a little too positivity focused for my tastes (I also don't know that I'm "nice" enough to get along well there).

I think another reason too is that .world is run by Ruud who is a trusted actor in the space (he already runs Mastodon.world, a large mastodon instance), and so many (including me) probably felt it would be a safe harbor and not likely to get shut down or run poorly.