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
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.
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.
Feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz and other English speaking instances still exist
Good point about the laws.
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.
In the current context, seems like !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world is the way to go
For politics yeah. And I suppose if there is need for more, it could grow.🪴
I’m half thinking about creating AskUSA on lemmy.today just to centralize the US discussions somewhere 😅
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!:-)
Open !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world and behold the 20 questions asked regarding US politics
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:-).