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/

Back to main discussion

Avatar 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.

cm0002

Yea but that's media media, this thread is about User Generated Media

Avatar oce 🐆

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.

Avatar deegeese

When Indians want to chat online, I don’t think they’ll speak English with other Indians.

Avatar oce 🐆

They may actually use English if they don't have the same native language, many have another native language than Hindi. Also if they want to be readable more easily by the rest of the world like I'm doing currently.