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

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

  • deegeese@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    160·
    20 天前

    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@lemmy.worldEnglish
      59·
      20 天前

      .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@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.usEnglish
            17·
            20 天前

            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)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
              9·
              20 天前

              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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            20 天前

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

      • deegeese@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        24·
        20 天前

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

        • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
          5·
          20 天前

          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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            15·
            20 天前

            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 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
              3·
              20 天前

              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.

                • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
                  1·
                  20 天前

                  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.

          • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            4·
            20 天前

            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)?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    71·
    20 天前

    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@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
      24·
      20 天前

      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.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    22·
    20 天前

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

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
      19·
      20 天前

      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).

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
    17·
    20 天前

    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@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      17·
      20 天前

      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.

    • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      20 天前

      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)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
            1·
            20 天前

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

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              20 天前

              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!:-)

                • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                  1·
                  19 天前

                  Hehehe, yes ofc.:-)

                  But I meant that how much is temporary vs. a long-standing issue, and ofc much of that overlaps heavily with more general interest - e.g. “List of book and/or film titles dealing with resistance movements–organization, strategy, tactics, etc?” is most definitely not something dealing solely with USA politics.

                  But also I know that you tend to have your idea on the ball regarding such matters, so even more than the above thought my reply was also my way of saying that I’ll take your word for it bc surely you know better than me:-).

  • LiPoly@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    15·
    20 天前

    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™️

      • LiPoly@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        5·
        20 天前

        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?

  • Andrew@pythag.netEnglish
    14·
    20 天前

    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.

    • drake@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      20 天前

      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

      • Andrew@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        20 天前

        Hmmm. I’d imagine that’s essential for cloudflare to work. You can get their IP addresses if you have a server that is federated with them and you look in your nginx logs (so that ‘if’ is a big IF).

      • Andrew@pythag.netEnglish
        5·
        20 天前

        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).

      • Sundial@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        20 天前

        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.

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
          2·
          20 天前

          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@fedia.io
        7·
        20 天前

        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]@lemmy.todayEnglish
    10·
    20 天前

    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.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
      4·
      20 天前

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

  • Spiritsong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    20 天前

    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.