Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it’s still in !politics@lemmy.world )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
To be fair, I cross post a lot, but over time I gets a bit annoying, especially when you know that today with user-level federation maybe Beehaw could consider refederating with LW and SJW
Beehaw has given up on Lemmy (Or just given up in general? They aren’t taking care of what they have nor have they moved to something new).
They’re still on v0.18.4 despite v0.18.5 being an extremely easy and safe update with a hotfix for an issue they were specifically complaining about. Literally takes like a couple minutes to do that update but they never did it. They’re also keeping themselves open to at least 1 security issue by being on such an old version.