Is there any reason why there is no large generalist Lemmy instance managed from the USA? Is this just a coincidence?

submitted by Blaze (he/him) edited

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 - feddit.uk - jlai.lu - feddit.dk - szmer.info - lemmy.eco.br - feddit.cl - feddit.it

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

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

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82 Comments

deegeese

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.

grue , edited

.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!

abff08f4813c

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.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

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?

abff08f4813c , edited

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

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

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

davidgro

I assume it was just named after r/politics - like most of the other communities here during the migration.

poVoq

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.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

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

deegeese

American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.

Sunshine (she/her)

America does have the largest population of English speakers.

oce 🐆

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.

cm0002

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

oce 🐆 , edited

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.

Ben Matthews , edited

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)?

inv3r510n

Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing since the EU had better data privacy laws?

-USAmerican

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.

nocturne

I have considered doing this, but I am perfectly happy with sopuli.

poVoq

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.

abff08f4813c

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.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

That's a good point.

yessikg

I would just like to say, thank to all instance admins for the incredible foresight

poVoq , edited

Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

Thank you!

KryptonBlur

Much love to the slrpnk.net admin team

🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️ , edited

Isn't Lemmy.World based in the US?

Edit: huh. Netherlands.

poVoq , edited

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).

nocturne

I thought it was in Finland.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

Dutch admin using a Finnish VPS from a German hosting company

Max-P

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.

Zaktor

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.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

Feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz and other English speaking instances still exist

Good point about the laws.

OpenStars

But if there were, say, an analog to !askuk@feddit.uk 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.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

In the current context, seems like !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world is the way to go

OpenStars

For politics yeah. And I suppose if there is need for more, it could grow.🪴

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

I'm half thinking about creating AskUSA on lemmy.today just to centralize the US discussions somewhere 😅

OpenStars

Looking ahead, one difficulty might be that I don't think that existed on Reddit (or if it did, surely it wasn't well-known).

And the community sidebar is quite hidden on Lemmy especially from mobile apps. Creating a post presumes that you know exactly where you'll send it, without e.g. offering alternative solutions. I thought that Hexbear might be able to shunt posts made from one community over to another, but that probably took a modified codebase.

Oh, I see a !askmidwest@midwest.social.

Anyway if you see that there's enough demand for it (I haven't looked myself) then that sounds great!:-)

originalucifer , edited

ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).

shoulderoforion , edited

fedia.io, which is mbin, is us based

Nougat

*mbin

shoulderoforion

cheers

Sundial

.world is more or less an American instance in all but name.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

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?

Sundial

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.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

That's probably it

Rhaedas

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.

Rhaedas , edited

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.

smokebuddy [he/him] , edited

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.

Spiritsong

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.

foggy

Aggregates gonna aggregate

Aatube , edited

dbzer0 is only as thematic as ml is imo

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

For me it's the piracy instance, and I didn't mention ml, hexbear or grad as they aren't generalist

solrize

I'm on ml and it seems pretty general. It has a bit more fringe contingent than world, but everything else is there too.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

The instance bans seem to happen quite often https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Pilferjinx , edited

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.

Nougat

Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.

poVoq

What makes you think so? It seems rather openly "leftist" at least for US standards.

LiPoly

Last I checked, the Fediverse as a whole is kind of an European thing. Across the pond, nobody really cares. They have a very different understanding of privacy and freedom and therefore no real desire to use some decentralized crap with shitty UI and broken federation when there’s a perfectly good alternative out there that just works™️

nanook

Banned

LiPoly

Sure, it's either everyone cares, or no one cares. No in between. Dude.

Look at the statistics. US has 1K servers. Thats 1 server per 340 000 people. France has 1 server per 82 000 people. Germany has 1 server per 114 000 people. See where I'm going with this?

nanook

Banned

Valmond

Wut?

Rogue

Some right wingers are upset that in some European countries there are consequences for posting death threats on Twitter

nanook

Banned

nanook

Banned

nanook

Banned

originalucifer , edited

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.

blibla

doesn't make much difference where your instance is hosted as long as it's not north korea or something

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

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

blibla

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

DudeImMacGyver

Midwest.Socisl

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).

Steve , edited

I think you're missing Lemmy.world.
Easily the biggest, and US based.

Blaze (he/him) [OP]

It's the first one mentioned, and Ruud, the founder, is Dutch.

Steve , edited

Ruud is Dutch. FediDB says the server is in the US. So maybe we're talking about two different things.

Blaze (he/him) [OP] , edited

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

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

Also https://feddit.org/post/4529920/2999419

abff08f4813c

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.

Steve , edited

FediDB says it's located in US.

abff08f4813c

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...

MBM

The founder is Dutch, it's hosted in Finland, and the hosting company is German