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.
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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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
American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.
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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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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.
Thank you!
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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.
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.
Feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz and other English speaking instances still exist
Good point about the laws.
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.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.
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dbzer0 is only as thematic as ml is imo
For me it's the piracy instance, and I didn't mention ml, hexbear or grad as they aren't generalist
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doesn't make much difference where your instance is hosted as long as it's not north korea or something
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