Is there any reason why there is no large generalist Lemmy instance managed from the USA? Is this just a coincidence?


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

  • 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
- 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?

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

legal.lemmy.world/tos/

This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 8:26 AM)
in reply to Sundial

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?

in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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.

in reply to Sundial

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.
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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.
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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Ruud is Dutch. FediDB says the server is in the US. So maybe we're talking about two different things.
This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 2:06 AM)
in reply to 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️

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).
This entry was edited (Thursday, November 7, 2024, 11:47 PM)
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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.

don't like this

in reply to deegeese

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

in reply to oce 🐆

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

in reply to cm0002

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.
This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 12:45 AM)
in reply to oce 🐆

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)?
This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 11:37 AM)
in reply to deegeese

.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!
This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 12:04 AM)

don't like this

in reply to grue

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.

in reply to abff08f4813c

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?

in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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

This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 12:54 AM)
in reply to abff08f4813c

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.
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

I've tried to bring up a Lemmy Instance but the instructions and documentation just are not clear. I want to bring it up with the instance itself not on the same server as the web server and the database, but it wires everything to localhost.
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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.

in reply to Blaze (he/him)

It's general, usually. It has taboo subjects though I wish they make very clear. No criticism of Russia or China. No criticism of communism or it's history. Genocide is a hit or miss depending who commits it.
This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 8:31 AM)
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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.
in reply to poVoq

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.

in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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.

This entry was edited (Friday, November 8, 2024, 6:20 AM)
in reply to Blaze (he/him)

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).
in reply to Andrew

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

legal.lemmy.world/tos/

in reply to Nanook

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?

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