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
Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing since the EU had better data privacy laws?
-USAmerican
Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.
I would just like to say, thank to all instance admins for the incredible foresight
Last I checked, the Fediverse as a whole is kind of an European thing. Across the pond, nobody really cares. They have a very different understanding of privacy and freedom and therefore no real desire to use some decentralized crap with shitty UI and broken federation when there’s a perfectly good alternative out there that just works™️
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Sure, it’s either everyone cares, or no one cares. No in between. Dude.
Look at the statistics. US has 1K servers. Thats 1 server per 340 000 people. France has 1 server per 82 000 people. Germany has 1 server per 114 000 people. See where I’m going with this?
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Wut?
Some right wingers are upset that in some European countries there are consequences for posting death threats on Twitter
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I just want to say, you’ll be much better off if you forget about the points and try to ignore them. Taking all this to heart with such intensity will only stress you, since you can’t decide how others perceive you and your takes.
Just chill, participate and enjoy. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Interesting. This actually puts into question why certain subs does not have countries assigned. Like news should be news, not a one country spesific news.
Aggregates gonna aggregate
doesn’t make much difference where your instance is hosted as long as it’s not north korea or something
I was referring to the tendency of US citizens to overtake generically named communities like !politics@lemmy.world
If LW was managed by a US team, why not, but it’s not so it just seems strange
i get that and you are right that they do. I would guess that most users are us americans despite them not managing the instance. That’s where i am coming from when i say, that it doesn’t matter where the instance is hosted
Midwest.Socisl
Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).
I think one reason has to do with digital sovereignty. Especially people in Europe are not happy with the dominance of US based social media sites and thus are more likely to invest time and effort into local alternatives. They are also more likely to be concerned about the near total lack of legal privacy protections in the US.
Came here to say that. I wasn’t covered by GDPR under spez’s site - but luckily their policies treated me like I was anyways.
I moved to kbin.social - which was probably the 2nd largest after lemmy.world. Also, it was Polish.
What I liked about that was - as per my understanding - since these are hosted in the EU, the GDPR applies to my data here even if I’m not the EU myself and am not an EU citizen.
That’s a good point.
ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).
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).
Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.
Much love to the slrpnk.net admin team
Thank you!
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.
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!:-)
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:-).
fedia.io, which is mbin, is us based
*mbin
cheers
I looked up lemmy.ml out of interest (I realise you aren’t classifying it as generalist). Anyway: it says that the server is in France.
Also, if you’re able to lookup by IP instead of URL, you can bypass any CloudFlare confusion, and confirm that LW is hosted in Finland.
Cloudflare will proxy DNS requests as well, by the way, so I’m not sure how you would get the IP address if all of their host names are proxied through Cloudflare
Hmmm. I’d imagine that’s essential for cloudflare to work. You can get their IP addresses if you have a server that is federated with them and you look in your nginx logs (so that ‘if’ is a big IF).
Also
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
Unrelated question: new instance, is it yours?
Yeah - it’s what I use for testing stuff (it’s a bit underpowered though: 1 core CPU, 1 GB Ram). I made that comment partly to verify how it would be announced back to me from .world (except I forgot to subscribe first). Anyway, now mastodon.social is aware of me, and is very keen on telling me about accounts that have been deleted (I swear that site has deleted more accounts that could ever have been created).
.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.
That’s probably it
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 had no idea lemmy.today was that sparsely used. I appreciate their hands-off approach and the reliability is pretty solid. Just wanted to say I like what they’re doing here.
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