friendica.eskimo.com

Blaze (he/him) via Fediverse lemmy (AP)

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 (2 weeks ago)
171 6 1
Sundial lemmy (AP)
.world is more or less an American instance in all but name.
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)

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?

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Sundial lemmy (AP)

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.

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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
That's probably it
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Rhaedas mbin (AP)
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.
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Rhaedas mbin (AP)
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.
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originalucifer mbin (AP)
ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).
29 1 1
Steve lemmy (AP)
I think you're missing Lemmy.world.
Easily the biggest, and US based.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
It's the first one mentioned, and Ruud, the founder, is Dutch.
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Steve lemmy (AP)
Ruud is Dutch. FediDB says the server is in the US. So maybe we're talking about two different things.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)

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/

Also feddit.org/post/4529920/299941…

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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abff08f4813c piefed (AP)

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.

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Steve lemmy (AP)
FediDB says it's located in US.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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abff08f4813c piefed (AP)

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...

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MBM lemmy (AP)
The founder is Dutch, it's hosted in Finland, and the hosting company is German
3 1 1

Isn't Lemmy.World based in the US?

Edit: huh. Netherlands.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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poVoq lemmy (AP)
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 (2 weeks ago)
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nocturne lemmy (AP)
I thought it was in Finland.
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
Dutch admin using a Finnish VPS from a German hosting company
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deegeese lemmy (AP)

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.

159 1 1
Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)

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

4 1
deegeese lemmy (AP)
American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.
22 1 1
oce 🐆 lemmy (AP)
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.
4 1 1
cm0002 lemmy (AP)
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

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oce 🐆 lemmy (AP)
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 (2 weeks ago)
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cm0002 lemmy (AP)
Yea but that's media media, this thread is about User Generated Media
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oce 🐆 lemmy (AP)
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.
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deegeese lemmy (AP)
When Indians want to chat online, I don’t think they’ll speak English with other Indians.
1 1 1
oce 🐆 lemmy (AP)
They may actually use English if they don't have the same native language, many have another native language than Hindi. Also if they want to be readable more easily by the rest of the world like I'm doing currently.
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Ben Matthews lemmy (AP)
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 (1 week ago)
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grue lemmy (AP)
.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 (2 weeks ago)
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abff08f4813c piefed (AP)

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.

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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
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?

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abff08f4813c piefed (AP)

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 (2 weeks ago)
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
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

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davidgro lemmy (AP)
I assume it was just named after r/politics - like most of the other communities here during the migration.
5 1 1
poVoq lemmy (AP)
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.
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Nanook friendica
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.
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originalucifer mbin (AP)
mbin is pretty modular, you can totally segment services if you know what youre doin... in fact part of the reason i chose it, for scaling.
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Max-P lemmy (AP)

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.

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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)

Feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz and other English speaking instances still exist

Good point about the laws.

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Zaktor lemmy (AP)
I'm in the US and was specifically drawn toward European instance because my (admittedly very lightly informed) understanding is Europe just has better laws on internet freedoms. IIRC a US-based Mastodon instance (Mastodon maybe?) was seized by cops at one point for pretty questionable reasons. Our legal system gives far too much power to police and corporations to enact spurious searches and punishment.
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Aatube mbin (AP)
dbzer0 is only as thematic as ml is imo
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
For me it's the piracy instance, and I didn't mention ml, hexbear or grad as they aren't generalist
5 1 1
I'm on ml and it seems pretty general. It has a bit more fringe contingent than world, but everything else is there too.
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Pilferjinx lemmy (AP)
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 (2 weeks ago)
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poVoq lemmy (AP)
Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
Thank you!
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KryptonBlur lemmy (AP)
Much love to the slrpnk.net admin team
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poVoq lemmy (AP)
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.
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
That's a good point.
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abff08f4813c piefed (AP)

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.

24 1
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.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
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fedia.io, which is mbin, is us based
8 1
Nougat mbin (AP)
*mbin
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Nougat mbin (AP)
Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.
8 1 1
poVoq lemmy (AP)
What makes you think so? It seems rather openly "leftist" at least for US standards.
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Andrew piefed (AP)

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 (2 weeks ago)
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
Unrelated question: new instance, is it yours?
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Andrew piefed (AP)
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).
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)

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/

1 1
drake lemmy (AP)
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
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Nanook friendica
@LiPoly @Blaze (he/him) If no one outside the EU cared there wouldn't be so many crying liberals here today. I'm in the USA by the way.
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Spiritsong lemmy (AP)
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.
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foggy lemmy (AP)
Aggregates gonna aggregate
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Nanook friendica
@LiPoly Yes there are more servers there, but there you can't say what you want to without fear of going to prison.
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inv3r510n lemmy (AP)

Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing since the EU had better data privacy laws?

-USAmerican

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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.
2 2 1
nocturne lemmy (AP)
I have considered doing this, but I am perfectly happy with sopuli.
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DudeImMacGyver lemmy (AP)
Midwest.Socisl
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)
Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).
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yessikg lemmy (AP)
I would just like to say, thank to all instance admins for the incredible foresight
26 1
Nanook friendica
@LiPoly It's funny how unpopular the truth is amongst liberals.
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Nanook friendica
@LiPoly Everyone votes me down for that, well ok, but if YOU call out the Jews for slaughtering Palestinian children, to jail you go. You know that's true.
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blibla lemmy (AP)
doesn't make much difference where your instance is hosted as long as it's not north korea or something
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Blaze (he/him) lemmy (AP)

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

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Nanook friendica
@Blaze (he/him) @blibla Well the .world extension would suggest that it is more than just France.
blibla lemmy (AP)
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
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Nanook friendica
@LiPoly And so the downvote to even this comment proves! 🤣
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orgrinrt lemmy (AP)

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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