A ton of countries have a decently active Lemmy instance, including the English-speaking ones (UK, AUS, NZ, ZA).
The closest to a US one that I know of is midwest.social, which looks pretty lively from what I can tell.
Anyway, so lemmy.world is becoming quite populated with all kinds of US-specific stuff, like communities for sports teams, sometimes with generic names that could be used for other things ( !bears@lemmy.world ), states/cities like !texas@lemmy.world or even !politics@lemmy.world (while !uspolitics@lemmy.world also exists), with other instances also having duplicate comms.
I’m expecting Lemmy to have, at some point, and hopefully soon, an option to block entire instances so that we don’t have to see posts especially that are country-specific. But I’ll need to block all the baseball teams one by one if I want to browse all and try to find new things.
And I’m sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.
So, please someone make one? Or navigate people to the right one? Thank yooou
The US-defaultism that happens on the internet is very annoying
I immediately became a bit upset when I read this post and realized US defaultism was going to happen on lemmy too now. Very annoying thing.
You guys are nuts if you let it bother you.
Literally makes no sense.
The US! Oppressing everything else in the world since…the beginning!
Yeah, it’s especially annoying when you live in a different English speaking country. I don’t give a shit about your pounds in the chicken recipe.
And cups, and spoons…
Yeah, wtf is a cup of butter?
So refreshing on a cold day…
There is no rule that everything about Germany is hosted on feddit.de and everything what is hosted on feddit.de is about Germany. I have a english language GalaxyWatch community located on feddit.de.
TBH, I do not know what is the best way to handle these. As far as I understand, the idea of fediverse is that instance as such must not be important. And there are many instances which have no “self-vision” or it is based on other logic than geography.
I have a english language GalaxyWatch community located on feddit.de.
Literally the first sentence in their sidebar says “Deutschsprachige Lemmy Community” (= German-language Lemmy Community). So you’re right that feddit.de is not about Germany but German is spoken in several European countries, so you do disrespect the intend of feddit.de by hosting an English community there.
They also write in their rules that it’s okay to create English speaking communities. So no harm done.
You know what I mean. Instances may be based on anything, but some are based on geography, and so it makes sense for communities also based on those aspects to be based on such instances.
Yesterday I came across a post “what’s your favourite book based in Melbourne?”, which was on a community on an Australian server. I’d assume communities about Australian rugby (or what’s it called) would also be there.
Geography-based instances also partially solve the problem of duplicate names, so you can have c/Manchester on different country instances.
I have a english language GalaxyWatch community located on feddit.de
Well the problem also is that instances don’t let you make a community if you come from elsewhere, and one can’t set their community to not appear under /All.
I wonder what comes first, if these features or instance-blocking.
I’d assume communities about Australian rugby (or what’s it called) would also be there.
Or may be they should be in a “sport instance”, so people who are not interested in sport can block whole sport instance? This makes a lot of sense for people who are not interested in given topic (for example sport, politics, cats, anime) - whatever geography or language is.
I see what where you can from, but I do not think that instance blocking and a strong geographical separation is a good solution. This, btw, will also enforce “US by default” pattern even stronger.
Isn’t lemm.ee US based?
It’s Estonian (.ee is the country code for Estonia) but it’s also a cool domain hack and the owner opened it to everyone.
Oh, thought I saw it was US based somewhere, must’ve mistaken it for another instance
If you search for it in a site hosting checker (e.g. https://sitechecker.pro/hosting-checker/) it says it is hosted in New York. It’s one of the reasons I picked the instance; I get low latency from it.
I mean pretty much every website is US focused unless stated otherwise.
And the argument always was that Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/whatever are American.
Well, Lemmy is not. So there’s no reason for it to be americanised by default.
(Unless we’ll hear the argument that the internet is American :p)
I don’t think hosting was ever the argument. It was always just that the vast majority of users were American.
Any site defaulting to English is going to attract users who predominantly speak English as their primary language, and then people who speak English as a sort of lingua franca are going to be a smaller part of that. Among native English speakers, Americans make up the majority, so that’s the prevailing default you are likely to see.
Even if Lemmy.world is hosted in Europe, I’d hazard that the largest user demographic is still Americans.
attract users who predominantly speak English as their primary language
I never understood this argument. Why do you think it’s important whether English is your primary language or not?
People in developed countries often speak English pretty much perfectly (and know the difference between their and they’re).
If you’re going to a web site with a mixed audience, you’re gonna use English, and if you’re going to a local one, you use your local language. No big deal?
Native English speakers have the advantage of not needing a different language to speak to their locals, but that’s all.
If somehow everyone agreed that Esperanto will be the default internet language, you wouldn’t expect the majority to be native Esperanto users.
I mean, I think I addressed that in my post. When the discourse is defaulted to English, you end up with users who are either native English speakers and people using English as a lingua franca.
In the Anglosphere, Americans make up the largest single chunk, and they accordingly see no need to “enclave” the way other groups may because being the biggest means their standpoint is effectively the default one.
ShitAmericansSay
If they were wrong people wouldn’t be complaining about US defaultism.
Given the prevalence of US defaultism, I don’t mind the lack of a US-specific one. Plus, unless an instance, or even community, is regionally specific, chances are Americans are going to assume it to be American. Even if that subreddit specifically claims to be worldwide, it may still be dominated in excess by Americans, like the politics @ lemmy.ml community.
Isn’t it ironic that lemmy.ml, run by essentially communists, shelters a forum for American politics?
And I’m sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.
I’m trying to advertise my country’s instance, feddit.nu (Sweden). feddit.de got a headstart with Germans by having been created before the Reddit migration and providing the first federated community discovery tool.
Instances that were created after the migration started on the other hand? It’s frustrating with Redditor behavior, because they expect the Lemmy community to share the same name as the Reddit community (/r/Sweden) and only subscribe to communities that use the same name.
If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand, please make sure to annoy their users about it as much as possible, in English, that they should move to the country-specific instances instead of centralizing on lemmy.world. It’s healthier for the Fediverse in general with everyone on many instances, in the long run.
If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand
Mastodon has a feature where you can set which language a post is in, and a setting in your account where you can select which languages you want to see. Is this not viable for Lemmy?
Edit: Nevermind, I just found out this feature is in Lemmy as well 😅
It is, but everyone just has it set to undetermined, because I don’t think you can set the default language you write in, so you’d need to set it with every post and comment.
(Or am I wrong?)
It might be because most of us Americans lick the boots of corporations for free or get in line to.
