Ok, good.

I'll respond to this tomorrow. Gird your loins.

The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

As far as I'm aware, this only applies to /news and /politics. Those are the two communities out of thousands that have a default unlabeled US community and a separate community for world topics. /games isn't specific to the US, /film isn't specific to the US, and so on.

So the claim that "anything without 'world' in its name is just about the US" is obviously incorrect, or that the very least a huge exaggeration. If you literally only use Lemmy for politics and news, that's the only way it makes sense. And many people tend to do the opposite and try to avoid those communities.

So the claim is wrong regardless, but even to the extent that it is valid, I would still defend the counterclaim.

most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

How do you define 'a large enough proportion'? I would argue that 50% is large enough to justify such an assumption by a significant margin.

There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics.

I think it's certainly possible to argue that the US is the default nation when it comes to news and politics, because our domestic events have by far the most global impact of any nation. Due to the $25T GDP and 11 aircraft carriers, what happens here has massive implications for other nations. If Trump gets elected, that has huge ramifications for European politics, Middle Eastern politics, you name it.

However, I ultimately do agree that it would be more logical to have the communities be flagged US politics/news. Unfortunately humans are rarely logical creatures, and our behavior can often be better understood in social terms. And socially, this just kind of became the default because it was mostly Americans on reddit at first, and then there's never been a compelling enough reason for it to change.