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 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.
Indeed. It always surprises me that !politics@lemmy.world is specifically US-only. Why not !uspolitics@lemmy.world?
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
Probably people creating the community soon after the instance creation
I assume it was just named after r/politics - like most of the other communities here during the migration.
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.