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 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.
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).
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.
Also
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
Unrelated question: new instance, is it yours?
Yeah - it’s what I use for testing stuff (it’s a bit underpowered though: 1 core CPU, 1 GB Ram). I made that comment partly to verify how it would be announced back to me from .world (except I forgot to subscribe first). Anyway, now mastodon.social is aware of me, and is very keen on telling me about accounts that have been deleted (I swear that site has deleted more accounts that could ever have been created).
Cloudflare will proxy DNS requests as well, by the way, so I’m not sure how you would get the IP address if all of their host names are proxied through Cloudflare
doesn’t make much difference where your instance is hosted as long as it’s not north korea or something
I was referring to the tendency of US citizens to overtake generically named communities like !politics@lemmy.world
If LW was managed by a US team, why not, but it’s not so it just seems strange
i get that and you are right that they do. I would guess that most users are us americans despite them not managing the instance. That’s where i am coming from when i say, that it doesn’t matter where the instance is hosted
Isn’t Lemmy.World based in the US?
Edit: huh. Netherlands.
Clownflare
Sorry but if I weren’t a robot I would do one of these: 😂
Dutch admin using a Finnish VPS from a German hosting company
ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).
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
Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.
Thank you!
Much love to the slrpnk.net admin team
I think one reason has to do with digital sovereignty. Especially people in Europe are not happy with the dominance of US based social media sites and thus are more likely to invest time and effort into local alternatives. They are also more likely to be concerned about the near total lack of legal privacy protections in the US.
That’s a good point.
Came here to say that. I wasn’t covered by GDPR under spez’s site - but luckily their policies treated me like I was anyways.
I moved to kbin.social - which was probably the 2nd largest after lemmy.world. Also, it was Polish.
What I liked about that was - as per my understanding - since these are hosted in the EU, the GDPR applies to my data here even if I’m not the EU myself and am not an EU citizen.
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.
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.
dominate any general audience English speaking online community
China, India, Africa and others will probably develop to the point of “producing as much media as the USA”, but I highly doubt they’ll simultaneously make a major shift to English for it
I think NA+EU+Commonwealth will remain an interesting rich market, so they will make it accessible to them, like the recent Chinese video game Black Myth Wukong, for example. Also India already produces a lot of movies with English version, and there are large parts of high demographic growth countries speaking English in Africa, for example Nigeria, projected to be 500M of people by the end of this century.
Yea but that’s media media, this thread is about User Generated Media
I agree. For global discussions, are many Indians going to learn Chinese, Swahili, Hausa, Arabic, and vice-versa ? Meanwhile international-english is the new latin… Even within India, the south insists to keep english as an official language, to avoid being dominated by more populous hindi-speaking north.
Alternatively LLM-translation may facilitate multi-lingual discussion, but in this case the language of software development may still be influential during such transition.
By the way - this is an important topic for future of lemmy, which should expand more towards the south - where’s a good place to develop it (beyond such set of replies)?
America does have the largest population of English speakers.
.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!
With a tld ending like .world you’d think it’s for the whole world, not just europe (.eu) or a specific country.
feddit.org itself is a bit of a curiosity since the .org doesn’t make it obvious that it is German - but someone posted the full story of how feddit.de fell apart and feddit.org became the successor.
Feddit.org is only majority German speaking (it’s actually run by an Austrian foundation) because people from feddit.de needed a new home. It is not per se only for German communities, for example /c/europe@feddit.org is in English.
With a tld ending like .world you’d think it’s for the whole world, not just europe (.eu) or a specific country.
Indeed. It always surprises me that !politics@lemmy.world is specifically US-only. Why not !uspolitics@lemmy.world?
That confuses me too. I’ve never really understood that. Likewise, /m/news is for US news while world news goes into /m/world and US news isn’t allowed.
Maybe that’s another reason why folks thing it’s US-based - because the magazines are clearly so US oriented. But I’m not sure how that happened.
On the brain bin for example it’s PoliticsUSA - https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticsUSA
Maybe that’s another reason why folks thing it’s US-based - because the magazines are clearly so US oriented. But I’m not sure how that happened.
Probably people creating the community soon after the instance creation
I assume it was just named after r/politics - like most of the other communities here during the migration.
I would just like to say, thank to all instance admins for the incredible foresight
.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?
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 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.
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.
That’s probably it
I think you’re missing Lemmy.world.
Easily the biggest, and US based.It’s the first one mentioned, and Ruud, the founder, is Dutch.
Ruud is Dutch. FediDB says the server is in the US. So maybe we’re talking about two different things.
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
The founder is Dutch, it’s hosted in Finland, and the hosting company is German
Why did you think lemmy.world was US based? It’s fully European.
But that’s probably it - folks assume the instance that’s for the whole world is the US-based one and don’t feel the need to make another major US-based one.
FediDB says it’s located in US.
Ah, that makes sense. So the FediDB info seems to be wrong - I wonder if they got confused by cloudflare as per the other comment in https://feddit.org/post/4529920/2993842 ?
Also, is there a way to let them know to update it? I guess someone could report an issue on github…
fedia.io, which is mbin, is us based
cheers
