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
.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 !politics@lemmy.world is specifically US-only. Why not !uspolitics@lemmy.world?
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.
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.
I think you’re missing Lemmy.world.
Easily the biggest, and US based.
Ruud is Dutch. FediDB says the server is in the US. So maybe we’re talking about two different things.
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
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.
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…
ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).
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.
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
American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.
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.
.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 !politics@lemmy.world is specifically US-only. Why not !uspolitics@lemmy.world?
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.
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).
