I downvote non-English results I see on my All page as a punishment for not correctly setting the language on the post, which takes 1 second to do and would ensure it doesn’t spam the feed for non-speakers. I can’t imagine I’m alone - was the post in question not correctly tagged as Polish content, like your post is correctly tagged as English content?
If it was correctly tagged, then those downvotes were all from people who speak Polish.
I’m not so sure about changing the terminology, but if we did, I think it should be a word that implies what the situation is: That the instance they pick isn’t a walled garden in itself, but just an access point to the wider connected Lemmyverse. I think that was a common confusion point for most of us when we first heard of Lemmy.
So… “access point”? Or “gateway”? Or for a milder change, going from “instance” to “default instance” might get the point across.
I’m pretty sure I’m in a minority here, but I like that lemmy.world is so huge - and think it’s both positive for the lemmyverse and an excellent starting point for new users.
It ties into the new user experience a lot: lemmy.world has a large userbase so most communities will already show up in its All. It’s consistently had new registrations open where many others have closed during large sign-up rushes. It has a thoughtful admin team experienced with running services like this. It’s likely to be around for the very long term and, short of some DDoS attacks, should be fairly reliable.
I know having instances this big is objectively bad if you’re measuring things like how distributed or resilient to disruption the Lemmyverse is, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives on the whole.
If I’m honest, I think the best way to implement an “I know which instance I pick isn’t that important, please just send me to a random one” feature would be to send the user to a random one of the top 5 largest instances. I stopped short of suggesting that because I know it would be deeply unpopular though - enough so that it becomes a bad idea on that merit alone.
They should add filters for language and general purpose vs. specific topic; options to sort by size, age, connectedness, and reliability; write a short blurb about the administration policy of each instance (provided by the instance admins themselves); and add an “I’m feeling lucky” button that picks a proven reliable general purpose instance at random and just sends you to it. As well as big, bold text at the top saying “The instance you pick honestly isn’t that important”.
This stance has nothing to do with anglocentrism and everything to do with making Lemmy usable. You set your languages in your profile so you’ll only see posts and comments in those languages. No one likes seeing lots of posts in languages they don’t understand, and that that only happens when people are too lazy to set the language indicator. I’d fully expect and encourage non-English speakers to downvote improperly tagged English posts in their feed as well.