A ton of countries have a decently active Lemmy instance, including the English-speaking ones (UK, AUS, NZ, ZA).

The closest to a US one that I know of is midwest.social, which looks pretty lively from what I can tell.

Anyway, so lemmy.world is becoming quite populated with all kinds of US-specific stuff, like communities for sports teams, sometimes with generic names that could be used for other things ( !bears@lemmy.world ), states/cities like !texas@lemmy.world or even !politics@lemmy.world (while !uspolitics@lemmy.world also exists), with other instances also having duplicate comms.

I’m expecting Lemmy to have, at some point, and hopefully soon, an option to block entire instances so that we don’t have to see posts especially that are country-specific. But I’ll need to block all the baseball teams one by one if I want to browse all and try to find new things.

And I’m sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.

So, please someone make one? Or navigate people to the right one? Thank yooou

  • NotAPenguin
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    1121 year ago

    The US-defaultism that happens on the internet is very annoying

        • @tegs_terry@feddit.uk
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          11 year ago

          ‘US defaultism’ seems to be a term created and used exclusively by Reddit. Is it people assuming they’re talking to an american online?

          • @LwL@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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            21 year ago

            It’s americans assuming everything must be about the US and everyone they’re talking to understands US terms or even is from there.

            Like using state acronyms with no context and assuming ppl will know what it means. Or random cardinal directions when there’s no country context. The whole thing likely exists because of the insane cultural bubble US education and media perpetuates combined with many people on the english speaking internet actually being from there.

            Oh and also many of the people on reddit complaining about it were utterly unable to see when there was context implying it’s about the US so they weren’t really better.

    • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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      421 year ago

      And the argument always was that Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/whatever are American.

      Well, Lemmy is not. So there’s no reason for it to be americanised by default.

      (Unless we’ll hear the argument that the internet is American :p)

      • @Stovetop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think hosting was ever the argument. It was always just that the vast majority of users were American.

        Any site defaulting to English is going to attract users who predominantly speak English as their primary language, and then people who speak English as a sort of lingua franca are going to be a smaller part of that. Among native English speakers, Americans make up the majority, so that’s the prevailing default you are likely to see.

        Even if Lemmy.world is hosted in Europe, I’d hazard that the largest user demographic is still Americans.

        • @time_example@lemmy.ml
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          71 year ago

          Actually (!) the majority of Reddit users are not American. Although Americans make up the largest single group, they’re in the minority overall.

        • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          attract users who predominantly speak English as their primary language

          I never understood this argument. Why do you think it’s important whether English is your primary language or not?

          People in developed countries often speak English pretty much perfectly (and know the difference between their and they’re).

          If you’re going to a web site with a mixed audience, you’re gonna use English, and if you’re going to a local one, you use your local language. No big deal?

          Native English speakers have the advantage of not needing a different language to speak to their locals, but that’s all.

          If somehow everyone agreed that Esperanto will be the default internet language, you wouldn’t expect the majority to be native Esperanto users.

          • @Stovetop@lemmy.world
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            81 year ago

            I mean, I think I addressed that in my post. When the discourse is defaulted to English, you end up with users who are either native English speakers and people using English as a lingua franca.

            In the Anglosphere, Americans make up the largest single chunk, and they accordingly see no need to “enclave” the way other groups may because being the biggest means their standpoint is effectively the default one.

            • @yata@sh.itjust.works
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              21 year ago

              When the discourse is defaulted to English, you end up with users who are either native English speakers and people using English as a lingua franca.

              But that is the thing, this assumption is most likely not correct. The second half of it is (which you didn’t mention in your original comment), but the first part is largely untrue.

          • @sauerkraus@lemmy.world
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            11 year ago

            People who speak English as a second language are able to engage with a platform in which the majority of users speak English. People who only speak English or that and their local language are unable to engage with a platform where the language used is not their own or English.

            More people are able to communicate with a shared language than with languages which are not mutually understood.

            One other factor contributes: the U.S. has a large population which shares both a language and some culture. While multiple other countries may share languages, the populations which share a similar level of culture are smaller.

            Then you have posts on social media being ranked in some way by engagement. One post may be relatable to 100k people, and five other posts are relatable to 20k each. The single post is ranked higher.

        • @yata@sh.itjust.works
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          21 year ago

          Your assumptions are incorrect. There never were a vast majority of American users, and English based sites doesn’t necessarily attract people who speak English as their primary language. The world knows (except for perhaps some Americans) that English is the lingua franca of our day, so English being used in a website doesn’t say anything at all about its geographical or cultural makeup.

      • @yata@sh.itjust.works
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        81 year ago

        It is a stupid argument anyway that fundamentally ignores the entire concept of the internet being global and universal. If a site is aimed at a global userbase it is mostly completely irrelevant (except for legal purposes of course) where that site was originally created or where the servers are located.

      • @InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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        51 year ago

        That was never the argument, the internet was always international and not just American.

        The issue is language, the assumption is English spoken content is assumed to be American or possibly british/Australian.

        I’d like to see that get more fluid, but that probably involves a lot of people speaking more English or more autotranslate kicking in.

        • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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          11 year ago

          Unfortunately it was an argument often repeated on Reddit. Stupid, but, whatever. But definitely can’t do that with Lemmy.

    • @Knoll0114@lemmy.world
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      221 year ago

      Yeah I assume the reason there isn’t is because the general ones are US-centric by default and then everyone else has to have somewhere specific to go. But I guess if they want their own dedicated place too why not?

    • tkc
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      151 year ago

      Isn’t that the problem being stated in the OP haha.

    • @woelkchen@lemmy.worldM
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      101 year ago

      I have a english language GalaxyWatch community located on feddit.de.

      Literally the first sentence in their sidebar says “Deutschsprachige Lemmy Community” (= German-language Lemmy Community). So you’re right that feddit.de is not about Germany but German is spoken in several European countries, so you do disrespect the intend of feddit.de by hosting an English community there.

      • Tywèle [she|her]
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        1 year ago

        They also write in their rules that it’s okay to create English speaking communities. So no harm done.

        • @woelkchen@lemmy.worldM
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          31 year ago

          They also write in their rules that it’s okay to create English speaking communities.

          I did not write that you broke a rule because there is no such rule but the intend of feddit.de is spelled out in the first sentence. Just as Lemmy.WORLD intends to be a worldwide community (“Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.”), there is no rule that forbids /c/politics not being about US politics only.

    • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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      31 year ago

      You know what I mean. Instances may be based on anything, but some are based on geography, and so it makes sense for communities also based on those aspects to be based on such instances.

      Yesterday I came across a post “what’s your favourite book based in Melbourne?”, which was on a community on an Australian server. I’d assume communities about Australian rugby (or what’s it called) would also be there.

      Geography-based instances also partially solve the problem of duplicate names, so you can have c/Manchester on different country instances.

      I have a english language GalaxyWatch community located on feddit.de

      Well the problem also is that instances don’t let you make a community if you come from elsewhere, and one can’t set their community to not appear under /All.

      I wonder what comes first, if these features or instance-blocking.

  • AZmaybe9
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    181 year ago

    It might be because most of us Americans lick the boots of corporations for free or get in line to.

  • Iron Lynx
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    1 year ago

    Given the prevalence of US defaultism, I don’t mind the lack of a US-specific one. Plus, unless an instance, or even community, is regionally specific, chances are Americans are going to assume it to be American. Even if that subreddit specifically claims to be worldwide, it may still be dominated in excess by Americans, like the politics @ lemmy.ml community.

  • Bob
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    151 year ago

    I mean you can just have your feed show only the stuff you’re subscribed to…

  • Andreas
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    121 year ago

    And I’m sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.

    I’m trying to advertise my country’s instance, feddit.nu (Sweden). feddit.de got a headstart with Germans by having been created before the Reddit migration and providing the first federated community discovery tool.

    Instances that were created after the migration started on the other hand? It’s frustrating with Redditor behavior, because they expect the Lemmy community to share the same name as the Reddit community (/r/Sweden) and only subscribe to communities that use the same name.

    If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand, please make sure to annoy their users about it as much as possible, in English, that they should move to the country-specific instances instead of centralizing on lemmy.world. It’s healthier for the Fediverse in general with everyone on many instances, in the long run.

    • Karu 🐲
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      1 year ago

      If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand

      Mastodon has a feature where you can set which language a post is in, and a setting in your account where you can select which languages you want to see. Is this not viable for Lemmy?

      Edit: Nevermind, I just found out this feature is in Lemmy as well 😅

      • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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        31 year ago

        It is, but everyone just has it set to undetermined, because I don’t think you can set the default language you write in, so you’d need to set it with every post and comment.

        (Or am I wrong?)

      • Andreas
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        21 year ago

        The feature is there, but it’s glitchy. Whenever I try to post with a language tag to lemmy.world and other big instances, the post screen stays loading forever and the post is never submitted. It only goes through when I remove the language tag, so I avoid posting non-English content on lemmy.world because I can’t tag it…

    • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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      41 year ago

      New instances have it super hard in general. This is an issue the Lemmy system needs to resolve somehow.

      • @woelkchen@lemmy.worldM
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        11 year ago

        This is an issue the Lemmy system needs to resolve somehow.

        Once you introduce anything that resembles an discovery algorithm, some people will lose their mind.

      • Andreas
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        11 year ago

        It’s difficult to come up with an onboarding solution that doesn’t give overwhelming power to the hands of a few people (who operate the onboarding platform), leading to centralization again.

        If everyone was directed to one central onboarding platform, the operators could choose to advertise and censor instances as they saw fit – which is why I don’t recommend potential Mastodon users to the join-mastodon.org server picker, because all of the instances there are hand-picked by mastodon.social admins.

        I didn’t expect security and outage threats to be the factor that keeps big instances in check, but I’m kind of glad for it.

        • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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          21 year ago

          I’m not sure what you’re saying. The centralisation problem is more right now, because lemmy.world is a go-to instance for everything.

  • Ech
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    1 year ago

    Nah. What’s weird is you thinking everyone should follow your strict rules about national segregation online.

    If it’s such a problem for you, instead of begging everyone else to fit your narrow world view, go find an instance that works better for you. Or, when you don’t because that’s ridiculous, make your own and block it off from everyone else not following your rules. Then you might be happy.

    • @WhoRoger@lemmy.worldOP
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      31 year ago

      I can totally see it happening. “World? What do you mean world beyond America? That’s the same thing!”