friendica.eskimo.com
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 fedidb.org/software/lemmy
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
- feddit.uk
- jlai.lu
- feddit.dk
- szmer.info
- lemmy.eco.br
- feddit.cl
- feddit.it
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?
FediDB is a cutting-edge service providing detailed statistics and insights into the Fediverse network.fedidb.org
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 feddit.org/post/4529920/299384… ?
Also, is there a way to let them know to update it? I guess someone could report an issue on github...
Isn't Lemmy.World based in the US?
Edit: huh. Netherlands.
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
dominate any general audience English speaking online community
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
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?
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 - thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticsUSA
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.
Probably people creating the community soon after the instance creation
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.
Feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz and other English speaking instances still exist
Good point about the laws.
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.
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.
Which is ironic as the Ruud, the founder, is Dutch
fedihosting.foundation/lw-team…
It always surprises me that !politics@lemmy.world is specifically US-only. Why not !uspolitics@lemmy.world?
Lemmy.World Team
Fedihosting Foundation (fedihosting.foundation)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.