I think lemmy.world is too large for the health of the fediverse. A nasty incident which takes it down permanently could "kill" Lemmy as a whole. Perhaps a sign up stop is in order.
I moved to a different instance about a month ago, after lemmy.world got hacked. I haven't had any issues on Midwest.social. I suggest other people do the same if they want Lemmy to be feasible in the long term. Get the fuck off Lemmy.world.
No idea. But if I were to guess, it looks like 'www.hexbear' was added in July and then reposted in August in an attempt remove the 'www'. I assume their intention was to follow the same syntax as everyone else, but they weren't able to delete the original 'www.hexbear'. Probably user error, but that's just a guess.
So are you recommending to switch instances and not interact with lemmy.world and its users? I don't get this, what's the point of something getting popular if you can't interact with it? So those that got in early get to be here while others have to start from scratch?
And what happens if you have a question and your instance has 10 users, while world has 3000?
That's not how federation works. You can still interact with lemmy.world and its users from another instance, but spreading out not only helps with lemmy.world's load, but also the fediverse.
Lemmy is a federated network (part of the Fediverse), meaning that, for the most part, all instances are linked together and share most of the same information and comments. If people move from one instance to another then their experience will be almost identical.
If you already have an account on Lemmy.world then you can transfer your account information to an account on a different instance by using one of the many tools created by Lemmy's users. The reason you would move away from Lemmy.world is that it helps decentralize Lemmy's data, so that if one instance goes down it doesn't have a large impact on others' Lemmy experience.
If you are using an instance with only 10 users, then here are some issues you might run into: there are less users to update the instance's 'communities' page, so you might have to add some communities to the instance manually; there aren't as many people maintaining the instance, so it might not be as well-maintained as some larger instances; the server costs might not be worth hosting for just 10 users (donate to your host, if you have the means to do so). However, there are a lot of smaller instances that are just as well-maintained as Lemmy.world (like Midwest.social).
I hope this helped you understand Lemmy a little better.
The fact is, lemmy.world's size is already actively harming the fediverse and it's quite annoying. No one said to "kill it" just stop it from growing even more
without user friction (in this case, a thing that prevents a user from agreeing without reading a textbox with a link to join another lemmy instance, even if its by the same people) its pointless