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?
I looked up lemmy.ml out of interest (I realise you aren’t classifying it as generalist). Anyway: it says that the server is in France.
Also, if you’re able to lookup by IP instead of URL, you can bypass any CloudFlare confusion, and confirm that LW is hosted in Finland.
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!
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.
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 [email protected] is specifically US-only. Why not [email protected]?
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
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/[email protected] is in English.
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: [email protected] , 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.
Doubt it will keep being the case in a couple of decades given the demography of China, India and Africa once they are all developed enough to produce as much media as the USA today.
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
Good point, but I think it’s possible Indian and Nigerian, for example, user generated English content, will compete with USA’s. Cultural bubbles may remain, but the internet in some ways also make them more porous.
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.
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.
That’s a good point.
ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).
Isn’t Lemmy.World based in the US?
Edit: huh. Netherlands.
Since they run their site through Clownflare, it looks like they are hosted in the US, but their server is actually in Finland (at least as far as I know, might have changed recently).
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.
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I think a part of it is that english is just the default language and strongly leans american already, so there’s just no demand for a USA instance and people just use the popular or thematic ones for that content. There’s no advantage in laws to prefer US hosting.
The country ones make sense because they’re also a different language, like jlai.lu in french, and the feddits for European languages.
I’m in the US and was specifically drawn toward European instance because my (admittedly very lightly informed) understanding is Europe just has better laws on internet freedoms. IIRC a US-based Mastodon instance (Mastodon maybe?) was seized by cops at one point for pretty questionable reasons. Our legal system gives far too much power to police and corporations to enact spurious searches and punishment.
But if there were, say, an analog to [email protected] but for USA, that would free up other communities to not be dominated so much by content from & for it.
e.g. if someone wanted to flee a state that did not provide abortion to one that did, they could ask the country specific one.
Though super good point that even so, perhaps it should not be hosted inside the country, especially given recent events.
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!
Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.
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 [email protected] is specifically US-only. Why not [email protected]?
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.
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.
I’ve tried to bring up a Lemmy Instance but the instructions and documentation just are not clear. I want to bring it up with the instance itself not on the same server as the web server and the database, but it wires everything to localhost.
mbin is pretty modular. you can totally segment services if you know what youre doin… in fact part of the reason i chose it, for scaling.
I think you’re missing Lemmy.world.
Easily the biggest, and US based.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…
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.
