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 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.
.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 [email protected] is specifically US-only. Why not [email protected]?
I assume it was just named after r/politics - like most of the other communities here during the migration.
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
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/[email protected] is in English.
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: [email protected] , 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.
America does have the largest population of English speakers.
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.
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)?
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
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.
Yea but that’s media media, this thread is about User Generated Media
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.
When Indians want to chat online, I don’t think they’ll speak English with other Indians.