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 https://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

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

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    165 hours ago

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

    -USAmerican

    • Blaze (he/him)OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      15 hours ago

      Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.

      • nocturne
        link
        fedilink
        English
        12 hours ago

        I have considered doing this, but I am perfectly happy with sopuli.

    • Blaze (he/him)OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      65 hours ago

      Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).

  • Spiritsong
    link
    fedilink
    English
    67 hours ago

    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.

  • @LiPoly
    link
    English
    57 hours ago

    Last I checked, the Fediverse as a whole is kind of an European thing. Across the pond, nobody really cares. They have a very different understanding of privacy and freedom and therefore no real desire to use some decentralized crap with shitty UI and broken federation when there’s a perfectly good alternative out there that just works™️

    • nanook
      link
      fedilink
      27 hours ago

      @LiPoly @Blaze 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.

      • @LiPoly
        link
        English
        27 hours ago

        Sure, it’s either everyone cares, or no one cares. No in between. Dude.

        Look at the statistics. US has 1K servers. Thats 1 server per 340 000 people. France has 1 server per 82 000 people. Germany has 1 server per 114 000 people. See where I’m going with this?

        • nanook
          link
          fedilink
          -47 hours ago

          @LiPoly Yes there are more servers there, but there you can’t say what you want to without fear of going to prison.

  • Andrew
    link
    fedilink
    English
    11
    edit-2
    11 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      47 hours ago

      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

      • Andrew
        link
        fedilink
        English
        45 hours ago

        Hmmm. I’d imagine that’s essential for cloudflare to work. You can get their IP addresses if you have a server that is federated with them and you look in your nginx logs (so that ‘if’ is a big IF).

    • Blaze (he/him)OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      29 hours ago

      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

      https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

      • Andrew
        link
        fedilink
        English
        49 hours ago

        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).

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    13418 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      50
      edit-2
      18 hours ago

      .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!

      • abff08f4813c
        link
        fedilink
        1617 hours ago

        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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            39 hours ago

            I assume it was just named after r/politics - like most of the other communities here during the migration.

          • abff08f4813c
            link
            fedilink
            English
            17
            edit-2
            17 hours ago

            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 - https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticsUSA

            • Blaze (he/him)OP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              917 hours ago

              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

        • poVoq
          link
          fedilink
          English
          717 hours ago

          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/[email protected] is in English.

    • Blaze (he/him)OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      518 hours ago

      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: [email protected] , all the recent posts are about the US elections

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        2118 hours ago

        American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.

        • Sunshine
          link
          fedilink
          English
          416 hours ago

          America does have the largest population of English speakers.

        • oce 🐆
          link
          fedilink
          English
          417 hours ago

          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.

          • Ben Matthews
            link
            fedilink
            English
            3
            edit-2
            6 hours ago

            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)?

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            1517 hours ago

            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

            • oce 🐆
              link
              fedilink
              English
              2
              edit-2
              17 hours ago

              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.

                • oce 🐆
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  013 hours ago

                  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.

  • poVoq
    link
    fedilink
    English
    5518 hours ago

    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.

    • abff08f4813c
      link
      fedilink
      2017 hours ago

      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.

  • originalucifer
    link
    fedilink
    2618 hours ago

    ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).

  • poVoq
    link
    fedilink
    English
    18
    edit-2
    18 hours ago

    Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.

  • Max-P
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1718 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1718 hours ago

      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.

    • OpenStars
      link
      fedilink
      English
      317 hours ago

      But if there were, say, an analog to [email protected] but for USA, that would free up other communities to not be dominated so much by content from & for it.

      e.g. if someone wanted to flee a state that did not provide abortion to one that did, they could ask the country specific one.

      Though super good point that even so, perhaps it should not be hosted inside the country, especially given recent events.

        • OpenStars
          link
          fedilink
          English
          14 hours ago

          For politics yeah. And I suppose if there is need for more, it could grow.🪴

          • Blaze (he/him)OP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            14 hours ago

            I’m half thinking about creating AskUSA on lemmy.today just to centralize the US discussions somewhere 😅

            • OpenStars
              link
              fedilink
              English
              12 hours ago

              Looking ahead, one difficulty might be that I don’t think that existed on Reddit (or if it did, surely it wasn’t well-known).

              And the community sidebar is quite hidden on Lemmy especially from mobile apps. Creating a post presumes that you know exactly where you’ll send it, without e.g. offering alternative solutions. I thought that Hexbear might be able to shunt posts made from one community over to another, but that probably took a modified codebase.

              Oh, I see a [email protected].

              Anyway if you see that there’s enough demand for it (I haven’t looked myself) then that sounds great!:-)

              • Blaze (he/him)OP
                link
                fedilink
                English
                241 minutes ago

                Anyway if you see that there’s enough demand for it (I haven’t looked myself) then that sounds great!:-)

                Open [email protected] and behold the 20 questions asked regarding US politics

                • OpenStars
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  126 minutes ago

                  Hehehe, yes ofc.:-)

                  But I meant that how much is temporary vs. a long-standing issue, and ofc much of that overlaps heavily with more general interest - e.g. “List of book and/or film titles dealing with resistance movements–organization, strategy, tactics, etc?” is most definitely not something dealing solely with USA politics.

                  But also I know that you tend to have your idea on the ball regarding such matters, so even more than the above thought my reply was also my way of saying that I’ll take your word for it bc surely you know better than me:-).

  • Nougat
    link
    fedilink
    917 hours ago

    Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.

    • poVoq
      link
      fedilink
      English
      25 hours ago

      What makes you think so? It seems rather openly “leftist” at least for US standards.

  • smokebuddy [he/him]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    9
    edit-2
    17 hours ago

    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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        818 hours ago

        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.

        • Rhaedas
          link
          fedilink
          218 hours ago

          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.

      • Rhaedas
        link
        fedilink
        518 hours ago

        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.