I think the issue is that .world has put itself forward as some sort of super lemmy.
Citation needed. All the admins of lemmy world ever purported to do was host a well-run general-purpose (aka not topic-oriented) lemmy instance. It was and remains that, and part of being a well-run general purpose instance is managing legal risk when a small subset of the community generates an outsized portion of it.
Being well run meant that they scaled up and remained operational during the first reddit migration wave. People appreciated that, but continuing to function does not amount to a declaration of being a super lemmy.
World also has kept signups open through good times, and more recently bad. Other instances at various times shut down signups or put irritating steps and purity tests along the way. Keeping signups open is a pretty bare-minimum bar for running a service though, it is again not a declaration of being a super-lemmy.
Essentially lemmy world just… kept working (until recently when it has done a pretty poor job of that). I dunno where you found a declaration that lemmy world is a super-lemmy, but it’s not coming from the lemmy world admins, it’s likely randos spouting off.
The lemmy world admins advertised on Reddit? Can you link an example?
Until recently EVERY lemmy instance was listed on join-lemmy.
They run a family of servers under the world tld, including at least mastodon, lemmy, and calckey. They’re all named similarly.
They ARE the biggest instance, but that happened organically. It’s not based on any marketing claims from the admin team about being a flagship/super/mega/whatever instance. People just joined, and the admins didn’t stop them (nor should they). It’s not a conspiracy to take over lemmy. It’s just an instance that… until recently… happened to work pretty well when some were struggling.