Thinking about this lately, especially in the context of the UD elections getting discussed a lot all over Lemmy.
If you look at the top 20 instances https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
- Lemmy.world and feddit.nl are Dutch
- Lemm.ee is Estonian
- Feddit.org, discuss.tchncs.de are German
- SJW and lemmy.ca are Canadian
- Lemmy.blahaj.zone, aussie.zone and Reddthat are Australian
- sopuli.xyz is Finnish
- slrpnk.net is Portuguese
- lemmy.dbzer0, infosec.pub, mander.xyz, programming.dev, lemmy.sdf.org are thematic
- Beehaw is USA-based, but defederated from LW and SJW and still on 0.18.3, so not sure they’re even that interested in Lemmy anymore
Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).
On the other hand, a lot of other countries have their own instances
With the USA population and the Internet presence of the USA citizens, you would expect at least one large generalist instance based in the USA, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Any ideas what the reasons might be? Is this just a coincidence?
Edit: for Lemmy.world:
The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed per the laws of the following countries and/or states:
- The Netherlands
- Republic of Finland
- Federal Republic of Germany
I never missed a US instance because LW is so US focused I assumed it was the main one.
We don’t need a US instance, we need more users to support active local communities.
.World not being hosted in the US is news to me (as an American member of it, no less). It’s definitely welcome news, though!
But then if any LW community are going to become US specific from now due to the political climate, should people not interested in that just move elsewhere?
Example: !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world , all the recent posts are about the US elections
American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.
America does have the largest population of English speakers.
Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing since the EU had better data privacy laws?
-USAmerican
Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.
I have considered doing this, but I am perfectly happy with sopuli.
fedia.io, which is mbin, is us based
*mbin
cheers
.world is more or less an American instance in all but name.
Which is ironic as the Ruud, the founder, is Dutch
https://fedihosting.foundation/lw-team/#org-chart
It always surprises me that !politics@lemmy.world is specifically US-only. Why not !uspolitics@lemmy.world?
I did not know that .world was made by a Dutch person. Thanks for teaching me something new.
.world seems to have been the default instance people went to when they left reddit. It’s more or less than mentality imported into Lemmy. This led to the fact that creating a US specific instance is not necessary. .world fills that niche enough.
That’s probably it
If Lemmy and other fediverse discussion areas had developed slower and more naturally there might have been more of a country/instance symmetry, but anyone who was around when the Reddit implosion and migration happened knows that it was total chaos and a grab bag of where a new user should sign up. Lemmy and the rest were not ready for such a shift, and now that everyone’s been in a place or two for a while, short of a closure or blocking or whatever there’s no reason to move around to a matching country and instance, if there even is one. People mainly look for popularity, activity, themes, and engagement, and if that’s found on the other side of the globe it works.
Probably trying to mirror Reddit, which had /r/politics for US, and /r/worldnews for everything else. There was a lot of effort (probably wrongly) to try and copy Reddit over instead of finding new ways to do things. /r/worldpolitics was the original sub, but there’s an interesting drama story there.
I had no idea lemmy.today was that sparsely used. I appreciate their hands-off approach and the reliability is pretty solid. Just wanted to say I like what they’re doing here.
deleted by creator
Interesting. This actually puts into question why certain subs does not have countries assigned. Like news should be news, not a one country spesific news.
Aggregates gonna aggregate
Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.
dbzer0 is only as thematic as ml is imo
For me it’s the piracy instance, and I didn’t mention ml, hexbear or grad as they aren’t generalist
I’m on ml and it seems pretty general. It has a bit more fringe contingent than world, but everything else is there too.
The instance bans seem to happen quite often https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
It’s general, usually. It has taboo subjects though I wish they make very clear. No criticism of Russia or China. No criticism of communism or it’s history. Genocide is a hit or miss depending who commits it.
Midwest.Socisl
Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).
