This is the correct answer. The devs have been saying this for years but new users often weren't aware of this and saw it as the default instance. It's good to see that's changed.
I think most of it has to do with that lemmy.world has better hardware than other instances. The admin Rudd has a lot of experience running federated services as well. So it may be his first rodeo lemmy-wise but not hosting a federated service with a large user-base.
So when a lot of smaller instances started getting overwhelmed and stopping signups, lemmy.world was going strong without the performance issues that other instances might see.
That along with the fact that NSFW content is allowed makes lemmy.world a good alternative for Reddit refugees looking for something stable with a similar set of rules as well.
I myself joined lemmy.ml at first, then beehaw.org when lemmy.ml asked everyone to spread out, and finally found home on lemmy.world because I didn’t really like how downvotes are disabled on beehaw. Not to mention the defederation that beehaw has done recently. Although I can understand and appreciate why they’ve done that.
I've signed up for a bunch of them and still haven't decided where I want to make my main. I know that annoys some people but I love it because it means I get to have a choice! I think I'll have a Lemmy world account since they're big, buti also want to find a good smaller community to have slower more meaningful conversations. I hope the Lemmy protocol adds support for account linking some day.
I’ve signed up for a bunch of them and still haven’t decided where I want to make my main.
Same story for me, although I keep coming back to Lemmy.world in the first instance, at least for the Lemmy instances (also explored kbin, tildes and squabbles). Mixed feelings about Lemmy.ml as I think there’s virtue being on the instance the devs run as it seems unlikely to go away, although there has been the talks around political views. From the political side, I do hang out more often than not in tech spaces though so I doubt it’d actually impact anything I’d want to engage in discussion about.
Also have an account with Beehaw which was my first but silly as it may seem, the name of that one puts me off a bit. “Lemmy.world” sounds like something I can more easily communicate to a friend verbally, for whatever that is worth.
I've moved once so far, but it wasn't as straightforward forward as I'd hoped. Do you know of a simple way to migrate (export/import) communities and settings across instances?
I started at BeeHaw because they have a lot of cool communities. I didn't want to write an essay (I'm exaggerating ...a little) to sign up for an account so I ended up on sh.itjust.works.
Haha same. I started at beehaw but am having a hard time manually adding communities that I want to keep in that feed since they aren't onfederated instances. So I moved to sh.ithust.works and reddthat.
I'll probably keep beehaw, I like a lot of what it has to offer and it's cool for it to be a specific corner for me. But one of the others will probably become my default home
I was uncomfortable with the fact that .ml was hosted in Malaysia
Not to discount your other points, but lemmy.ml isn't hosted in Malaysia. The .ml TLD is for Mali, a country in Africa. And the site is hosted by OVH, on servers in France.
Wow, thanks for that, I really thought .ml was Malaysia. While I had some mild concerns about Malaysia, isn't Mali a shit show as far as human rights? If the servers are in France, that mitigates a lot, but I think I have more concerns about Mali.
I'm not any authority, and I could be just ignorant, but my understanding is that the Malaysian government makes liberal use of laws against sedition and that govern communication to silence dissent. There was an artist who has been jailed a couple times this year for political satire. That kind of atmosphere doesn't seem like a good place to host communities that want free discussion.
Why did I create a Lemmy world account as opposed to beehaw or ml? Because it's the first one I saw. Because it doesn't matter. Because I don't know what ml stands for. Because Lenny world said "general use." Because I didn't have to fill out an application. Because I can still interact with everything else, and again, it doesn't matter.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Someone posted it, maybe in r/piracy, and I signed up. Didn’t give any thought to which instance I was signing up for because I didn’t understand the fediverse well enough yet lol.
Underrated comment. I picked it because I had no idea what I was doing and it sounded all-encompassing and I wanted access to everything. I didn't even know what an instance was. I just picked it because it sounded like a good guess to get access to all of Lemmy.
I am new like most of us. When I signed up I had no idea what an instance was. To me the name Lemmy.world sounded like it was more general and therefore would have more content so I picked that one.
Yeah the name sounded the most inviting. It's Lemmy... That's the name of what I want... And it's world, that sounds like a generic description of "everything". But at the end of the day I just clicked a link in a comment. Seemed to me to be the more popular one suggested.
Exactly this. I tried numerous times on lemmy.ml and never got an email back for the verification, so I just gave up. World is the next logical choice. Since beehaw is already defederating, if you're coming to the fediverse, joining an instance that's already isolating itself, even if it has good reasons, doesn't seem appealing. So lemmy.world it is. Tho here I am using my kbin mostly because then I have kbin, mastodon, and Lemmy integration all in one.
Lemmy.ml had a pinned post asking new people to go elsewhere while beehaw was denying “membership” to their little bubble. lemmy.world was welcoming everyone with open arms.
I was overwhelmed by the options of instances. Then Reddit is Fun had a pop up message suggesting to go to lemmy.world. I trusted Reddit is Fun so I followed its suggestion.
Funny how a lot of us originally found Reddit through watermarks on pics on Ebaum's World. Maybe worth flooding reddit with pics watermarked lemmy.world
I open today rif accidently and it started to work again. Logged out mind you. Got a weird message with instructions to log back into my Reddit account. Was able to browse Reddit as a guest on the meanwhile. Didn't want to log back in as fuck Reddit.
Did rif sell to Reddit? Couldn't blame him if he did but all the same I am leaving. Just can't see how rif would still work without Reddit owning his servers. Anyone know what is going on?
Reddit wasn't interested in buying any of the 3rd party apps. Since you know, apparently they're so great at making apps that there were a dozen third party ones that people preferred.
I don't know, but it might be that Reddit is only limiting API keys for authenticated sessions. That way the anonymous requests still work up to the free API rate limits.
I was overwhelmed by the options of instances. Then Reddit is Fun had a pop up message suggesting to go to lemmy.world. I trusted Reddit is Fun so I followed its suggestion.
I open today rif accidently and it started to work again. Logged out mind you. Got a weird message with instructions to log back into my Reddit account. Was able to browse Reddit as a guest on the meanwhile. Didn’t want to log back in as fuck Reddit.
Did rif sell to Reddit? Couldn’t blame him if he did but all the same I am leaving. Just can’t see how rif would still work without Reddit owning his servers. Anyone know what is going on?
[emphasis mine]
If anything, it sounds like rif sold to lemmy.world.
Probably because its name sounds official and it allows quick registration while others need approval (some never approves you).
Turns out it’s the right choice as the admin seems very active in updates and fixes. Lemmy.world also has a more chill homey vibes. At least that’s what I observed so far.
Regardless of the how, I think it's really cool that the top instance isn't run by the devs. Really shows off the power and appeal of decentralized services.
Lemmy.ml, to my understanding, was always meant to be a pilot instance from the devs of lemmy. Beehaw is kind of its own forum. There is also sh.itjust.works, but that has been caught up in some federation drama, and I don't think people like the name. Lemmy.world has been the right server at the right time to absorb everyone and I guess they have been able to keep up with sign-ups. Kudos to them.
Not really. We had a thedonald community for like 5 hours before it was banned, and a tiny number of people started shouting about how terrible we are because we don't read the minds of people joining.
Also, we're trying to run this instance democratically, and the first vote is a pretty easy no-brainer: defederate a hate speech instance. Not really "drama" as much as everyone has an opinion.
You can check out the discussion on the agora, the vast majority of the discussion is very respectful.
When I had to choose I thought .world means, it‘s the central, most important place to be. Didn‘t know what the other abbreviations meant. Didn‘t care.
ml is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Mali.
Introduced 29 September 1993
Intended use Entities connected with Mali
Actual use Sees some use in Mali and for some websites about machine learning. Use is relatively rare elsewhere.
Registration restrictions Yes, for free domains only
Lemmy.ml had sign ups closed. Behaw required a short story or something to get accepted. Lemmy.world was accepting sign-ups wasn't hosted somewhere shady and had active communities. It was a pretty easy choice. Assuming the admins have a pledge drive or something to host on AWS/GCP so we can get better burst capabilities I'd love to donate.
@ruud does good work, and he's a HELL of a good admin. I'd recommend that we all contribute in order to have a place to gather. I've been looking at the various solutions to the Reddit conundrum and, personally, I think that lemmy.world is our best bet at this point...
EDIT: I have no affiliation; I just think that we should pay it back however we can. It costs money to run servers and, even if we just "buy him a coffee," every little bit helps IMO.
@Ruud has been great and Lemmy.world has very transparent so I will throw some cash their way. The mastodon.world blog is transparent with costs and financials which I appreciate.
I would love to see if they have a roadmap of how they plan to address the current surge of traffic or if they plan to just wait it out with their current VPS.
@Ruud has been great and Lemmy.world has very transparent so I will throw some cash their way. The mastodon.world blog is transparent with costs and financials which I appreciate.
I would love to see if they have a roadmap of how they plan to address the current surge of traffic or if they plan to just wait it out with their current VPS.
Just think of each separate site (AKA 'instances', like lemmy.world, sh.it.just.works) as different competing versions of Reddit. All with their own different subreddits.
The key difference though is that these instances are all partnered together ('federated') because they are running on the same technology so you can see posts from the other instances.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. If I understand correctly, it functionally shouldn't matter which instance you use, because the experience is supposed to be the same across them all?
Does it matter that I'm on world? Is there a reason I might prefer a different instance? Something I'm missing?
Lemmy.ca is, but you have to write a blurb. It's a filter to keep spammers, bad actors, and bots down. Seems to be working though -- it's #8 on the population list and growing even though it is "closed".
Yeah going forward I'm going to just recommend lemmy.world to people, straight to the point and avoid a lot of the confusion over what instance to pick
I also chose mine because the name (haha funny ArchLinux meme - iusearchlinux.fyi) . But also because it didn't sound like a default instance.
Main reason is, you gotta spread the load, the original purpose of federation is to share the costs so we can keep things affordable and prevent enshittification - not to dump it all on one instance, otherwise we might as well just turn Lemmy into a monolithic structure like Reddit, like YouTube, like Facebook, like Instagram, like Twitter and so on and so forth. We don't want to outgrow donation funding. And we don't want to make one instance "too big to block" lest it starts to enshittify or get greedy and gain too much power over the rest.
In my opinion, no instance should ever be considered the "default" of any federated platform.
I joined world before I knew what an instance was. When the RIF app shut down, the developer recommended lemmy.world. I honestly, thought it was a single website.
RIF specifically directed me here. I didn't join one before that because I didn't know which one was "best". I honestly don't care which one I joined, I just wanted to be on the one everyone else is on. I know this mindset somewhat defeats part is the purpose of the federated communities. I don't care about that in the slightest I just want a clone of Reddit.
Also "world" sounds more generic/standard than ml. Most people probably think it's a military website or something.
You'll probably find 90%+ of casuals are in the same boat as me.
Same, though ML made me think "Machine Learning", and that it was a more tech-focused place. This was before I realised they they're all (broadly) the same, and assumed that they were groupings of similar topics like an old web-ring.
They were also running on a beefier server. On my first week I tried several instances, but lemmy.world was the most consistently up that was also in jerboa.
Lemmy.ml grew too large during the early days of June. They started to recommend people to NOT sign up for lemmy.ml and find another instance. The next instance that stood out was beehaw which rejected signups if they didn't like your answer as to why you wanted to join. After that, lemmy.world stood out the most.
Lemmy.ml basically shut up shop, redirecting people to other instances, because they were struggling, and the developers never really intended it to be as big as an instance as it has become.
Their registrations are still closed, so even if you wanted to join, that is not possible at the moment.
Idk about other people, but I don't really know how the instances work and the lemmy.world instance name seems the least abstract. Beehaw was confusing because it's not called lemmy so idk if it's a different thing or what, and idk what .ml means or stands for. Lemmy.world just looks like it's the default lemmy instance to me as a dunce who doesn't know how lemmy works.
Well put! I'm still very confused about "instances," and the way people talk about them makes it seem like you need to sign up for each one? But that can't be right, that would be way too confusing! Right? Lol.
Lemmy.world also seems like the best place to ask questions. Everyone I've encountered has been very helpful, and I see a lot of people talking about how positive the community is. So I'm trying to just sit back and enjoy the ride!
Imagine phone companies. An instance is like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile or any other provider.
If you want to talk to your friends, it doesn't really matter what instance they're on.
A Verizon customer can still call a AT&T customer no problem. A Verizon customer doesn't need to also sign up for AT&T to do that. It all just.. works.
People talking about different instances is like people talking about different phone companies. "Verizon's coverage is better" or "T-Mobile has better support" or that kinda thing.
I signed up on lemmy.ca yet you signed up on lemmy.world. We can interact though.
This community we are interacting on is in lemmy.world's instance but since our two instances are federated (work together like many others) we can interact in general and through any community in our instances or other instances that are federated with ours.
And are usernames unique across instances or can anyone copy anyone else's username by signing up somewhere else with the same name or just making a new instance?
Each instance has their own users, communities and rules. A user can subscribe to any community on any instance that's not blocked. Sometimes it's important to know the rules of the instance the community is on, because different things are allowed.
If I'm a user on lemmy.srv.eco, for example, I can still subscribe to any lemmy.world community and post/comment/vote just like a lemmy.world user.
The only real downside of being on a smaller instance is that you'll have to do a bit more work actively subscribing to things. An instance only pulls in a community if at least one user subscribes to it. On a big server, your all is very full of communities as there are more people subscribing to more diverse things. On a smaller instance, you'll need to do that yourself.
The advantage of being on a smaller instance is that with less load on the server, it'll work much faster.
Similar for me -- but add onto it, when I joined, lemmy.world was the only one of the top 3 most populated instances (with lemmy.ml and beehaw) that had open registration
Idk about other people, but I don't really know how the instances work and the lemmy.world instance name seems the least abstract. Beehaw was confusing because it's not called lemmy so idk if it's a different thing or what, and idk what .ml means or stands for. Lemmy.world just looks like it's the default lemmy instance to me as a dunce who doesn't know how lemmy works.
I think you nailed it. It comes down to usability and user experience. Migrating from Reddit and not knowing shit about fuck, I obviously choose the largest sounding instance (.world).
I still haven’t understood the whole thing yet, but the novelty is exciting and I’m willing to learn. Mass adoption needs a more streamlined experience though.
Honestly going for the 'largest' instance is kind of dumb naive. Smaller, faster instances provide a much better experience. Bigger is not better in the fediverse.
The whole point is to decentralise power away from a single instance, CEO or monopoly. If you're on a small instance you can still see all the content you want from all the other instances and you might even get a meaningful say in how your experience develops.
We don't want to build another Reddit we want to build an alternative that is better structured.
Ya it has a great domain name and didn't require an email when I signed up at least. I'm thinking about spinning up my own instance on AWS though since the lag and "bad gateway" stuff is annoying.
My leading theory is that both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml were in a list of 5+ “recommended” communities, and “world” is the only recognizable word that implies all-inclusivity. And now that the world population is so high, more people will assume that is the “default/correct” community.
I joined world because I figured it was a global community, and did not want to limit myself before I even knew what I was joining into. I may end up making 2 or 3 accounts just to have access to separate, possibly defederated, communities.
lemmy.ml really lagged in the early days and the first post on lemmy.world was /u/Ruud bragging about new hardware and how it’s all running smoothly with the influx
This was my reasoning. Sounded like .ml was having trouble and lemmy.world was advertising their upgraded server and seemed to working good so it's what I went with.
When I was joining ~a month ago the situation was very different
I tried lemmy.one - had some issues joining
I saw beehaw.org - no downvotes - not my jam
I saw lemmygrad.ml - too political for my tastes
I saw sopuli.xyz - most of local posts and server maintenance posts were in language I don't speak - maybe I can find something fitting me more?
I saw lemmy.world - small but not looking like private, in Europe, so pings should be ok and description seemed fine
I also saw lemmy.ml - seemed like the main instance with the most users - having some understanding of federation from Mastodon migration I decided to spread the load...
When Lemmy.ml was still on top I initially tried to sign up and was unable to. They could not handle the influx when the first migration occurred during the blackout days.
Lemmy.world allows creating communities, where as lemmy.ml doesn't. For me that was a big reason why I moved from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world. (I made this account after beehaw defederated lemmy.world. I would have made this my default account, but sadly there still seems to be some communication issues between instances. I have some communities on lemmy.world, but I don't see the content sync properly here.)
It's temporary until there are better mod tools - beehaw is supposed to be a safe space but they cannot keep their promise when federating with everyone else due to the amount of posts.
From what I recall (from all of 8 days ago) Beehaw said it was because lemmy.world allowed unrestricted signups and therefore was at risk from bots or (i guess) unsavory people, while Beehaw was trying to have a curated membership to be 'safe'.
Both of those instances tend to be fairly censorship heavy, so people who just want to have a chat will be less interested in joining an instance that's going to shut down a conversation that they're enjoying.
Before all this stuff with reddit went down, most of the instances on the threadiverse we're fairly censorship heavy, and so people didn't really bother coming over from the main fediverse. With the establishment of new and more liberal instances and the infusion of new users, the potential of Lemmy has really been unleashed.
I joined lemm.ee, but on my first day (3 days ago) lemm.ee was having significant issues with basic things like image upload or creating a community. Because of that, I moved over to lemmy.world "temporarily", but now I have more content here and am likely to just stay. I would have liked to have been on a smaller instance though for sure.
Yeah I feel ya, I have an account on the lemmy.world instance too. I feel like lemm.ee is faster in general, but the image upload limit does suck for this instance
I have an account on .world but lemm.ee is a great name and the admin who runs the instance sounds like a cool guy. Plus .world is already way overloaded so I was looking for another instance.
I chalk it up to the name. Your name is your central piece of branding, and can be used to your advantage. To me, when I wanted to join what I thought would probably be the largest lemmy instance, I didn't look at the stats or rules. I just looked at the names of all the not-tiny ones. This one clearly signified to me that the owner intends to become a very large Instance.
To most people, it will simply sound cool and be very easy to remember. Both of those are very important points.
Look at the automotive industry. Performance is desirable in a vehicle, certainly, but according to the market, does it seem more desirable than looking cool and having enough cup holders?
I came here from Apollo for Reddit. There’s a web app called wefwef that is a lemmy client that literally looks and works EXACTLY like Apollo. It even has apollo json import to find similar communities. Anyway, .world is the first server listed in the list so it’s where I registered.
I found a massive table of all the lemmy instances that allowed me to sort by features that were important to me. Does the community allow up/down voting, does it allow NSFW, does it allow porn? How many communities has it defederated with?
lemmy.world ticked all the boxes that were important to me.
I heard of Beehaw first but I got rejected twice when trying to make an account, so I tried World next and here I am.
Also don't understand how things work, so wasn't really sure what lemmy.ml was but I read it didn't matter where you created an account so I just stuck with World 🤷
Yeah, I tried to get into beehaw, but then I ended up on infosec.pub, which I really like. Read the rules/intro and decided it sounded like a good and safe place to be.
I tried to sign up with Beehaw.org, but for some reason it was taking forever. So I came here and joined. TBH, I'm still getting the hang of this whole lemmy.<whatever> thing. lemmy.world seemed like a good option.
You can't login on another instance, but you can interact with them from your own instance.
See it as email: I could be using Gmail and you could be using Outlook, but we can still interact with eachother. We cab send emails to eachother.
But when I want to send you an email I'm not going to use the Outlook website because you happen to use Outlook. I use Gmail and so my account is on the Gmail servers. So I login on the Gmail website to send you that email.
For me, I was looking at the "All" tab on a different Lemmy instance as I was figuring things out and noticed basically everything was coming from Lemmy.world, so I created an account there to be my main one, for now at least.
I actually started on lemmy.ml but it was always having issues so I went to lemmy.world and had better luck. Not saying lemmy.ml is bad I’m just saying it wasn’t working when I tried!
Same… signed up for lemmy.ml back in 2019. Didn’t use it much since there wasn’t much content being posted. After Reddit shit itself, I came back to my account and was noticing some severe slowdowns and a high error rate. Moving to lemmy.world has been better, though it also has been getting crushed. The admin seems more committed to scaling up though.
It's the top level domain of the nation of Mali. But in this case, I've seen it referred to as an abbreviation for "Marxist-Leninist" because those Lemmy admins are Communists.
I am new like most of us. When I signed up I had now idea what an instance was. To me the name Lemmy.world sounded like it was more general and therefore would have more content so I picked that one.
I didn't join lemmy.world, because the way I understand it now, it doesn't matter much which instance you join. Lemmy.world was already under strain when I signed up, so it seemed best to go somewhere less populous. I also made an alt on my native language instance and on the nsfw instance, because you know why.
I did the same too. I liked my current instance's affinity to technology and figured I may as well join a smaller server to avoid the strain of the Reddit exodus.
At the time I signed up Lemmy.World was pretty small, I just wanted an instance that wasn't .ml and had better policies... As it turned out the modlog is very transparent and they were deleting posts critical of the CCP/Russia. So I left and made an account on World.
It seems World was a good choice... Although now that it struggles with the amount of users it seems it might be worth setting an alt up on another instance just to help me out when it gets too busy over here.
I see a lot of posts about how lemmy.ml admins are deleting any posts critical of Russia & China. Are there any receipts for those claims? I haven't seen any actual proof, just a whole lot of people saying tankie.
I see a lot of posts about how lemmy.ml admins are deleting any posts critical of Russia & China. Are there any receipts for those claims? I haven’t seen any actual proof, just a whole lot of people saying tankie.
The modlogs show that the moderators there are doing their job. If folks wanna continue uncritically regurgitating NATO propaganda and McCarthyism, they can do it elsewhere. Though I will admit, the irony of thousands of people fleeing a capitalist sinking ship, to a ship built and run by communists, only to then complain about all the communists, is funny.
Not really - it only matters if the instance where you have your account (e.g. lemmy.world, in your case) is not federated with another instance (e.g., beehaw.org).
As long as your instances are federated, you'll be able to see everything on the other instance and vice versa.
There are weird states, such as instance A being federated to instance B but B not being federated to A. This means that users on A can see, comment, and (potentially? I think?) create posts for communities on B but no other instance (B, C, or otherwise) can see those comments/posts.
I can only speak for myself, but as a complete newbie who wanted to create an account and figure out how lemmy works, I honestly thought lemmy.world is the main site and everything else is just smaller niche communities.
There was an ELI5 post that clarified how it all works, but that was after I created my account.
Yea I made like 4 accounts with .world being the last, because I thought I needed an account for every instance. I'm now learning I don't need to do that.
A reddit user made a list of alternative services for reddit. The list was .world, .ml and bee. At this point i didn't know it's the same decentralised service. I picked the first one, liked it and made an account after a few days.
The question was already answered by others. As a nitpicky side note: Developers have nothing to do with server popularity. They just develop the software on GitHub. This software is then run on all lemmy instances, by admins. Admins can influence instance size, by opening/closing it for registration, through policy and communication. Further down in the hierarchy, the regular users can advertise for their instance.
Yep! I added wefwef to my home screen where Apollo was (still installed but moved to an honoring folder). My workflow and habits are now unchanged and I feel like I’m on reddit, only federated. 🙂
Yeah, when I was looking for a post-redit home I checked out beehaw.
Strike 1: no downvotes
Strike 2: application period to create an account
Strike 3: I read the beehaw mod's "philosophy" posts and I got the general idea of what they were saying, but they just sounded a little... odd. Like they were thinking things through and were going around in circles without really getting anywhere. By contrast, the tildes.net philosophy posts seemed well-thought-out and very readable.
It might be completely false but i read that there were many tankies on other instances. One thing that got in the way of competitors in the past was the high number of extreme right wing people. My take is that people would rather not associate with either.
For me it was the fact I kept mistyping the url as lm instead of .ml
You know, LeMmy dot LM
After nth time making this mistake, I decided to switch to something easier to remember.
@gylotip meanwhile I'm just sitting over on kbin.social, eating popcorn and watching the lemmy instances rant at each other. Come to the dark side - we have kookies!
When I signed up, lemmy.ml had a lot of technical problems, and the registration wouldn't go through (endless loading circle) so I just signed up on Lemmy.world. I can imagine a lot of people doing the same.
I already see a lot of slang bullying on these instances that claim to be inclusive. It's just like reddit forming the karen meme during thier anti bullying campaign.
To be fair, "karen" actually started as slang in the US Black community, describing a white woman who deludes herself into thinking a normal Black person just existing in her vicinity is somehow a mortal threat to her and calls the cops on them.
But yeah, like pretty much every slang term invented by Black people to discuss racism that hits the mainstream, it got misused over and over until it lost all its original meaning. Nowadays, it basically means "a middle-aged woman does something I personally find annoying (including just existing in my vicinity)".