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
Regarding your last point, tools like Lemmy Federate make this less of an issue.
Indeed, I use it from time to time, but from my experience, it seems like LW users tend to stay on their local feed, increasing the visibility of their local communities compared to ones from other instance
Can’t help those who won’t help themselves 🤷♂️
Indeed, but the issue is when one third of the population is there
Is Lemmy World’s default when signed in local? Or is this a consequence of many more active communities being there?
Not sure, might be, I’m too lazy to setup another LW account to find out ha ha.
Might also just be that it’s their way of avoiding political content from lemmygrad, hexbear and lemmy.ml