Why is Lemmy only popular in the western World?

It's mostly an English language forum. But there's instances that are set up in German, and I wanna say Farsi (don't hold me to that, I'm going off what someone else said it was). There's communities that are Spanish and Portuguese based, though I can't recall if there's instances in those or not. I've seen Cyrillic posts and comments, though I couldn't tell you anything more than that.

So, it's not totally western world, just damn near it.

There's a decided lack of Asian presence in years terms of instances, but there are users that have said they're from japan, korea, and thailand (iirc).

I've yet to run across anyone saying they're from anywhere in Africa.

South America, I'm not sure if you count as western or not, but there's definitely some folks from Brazil, and I wanna say Venezuela? But it's been a few months since I ran into that conversation, could have been something made me think Venezuela when it was somewhere else.

But, tbh, lemmy started out as, and still is, a reddit offshoot. Reddit was not only predominantly western, but predominantly american in user base. Lemmy seems a little more diverse than that, and also seems to be shifting at least more European than reddit ever has been.

I'm pulling all this from memory of seeing people talk about where they're from, over mostly the last two years, since before the reddit debacle in 23, I maybe used lemmy a handful of times, just to keep track of how it was going.

Reddit was (and still is) seen as foreign/overseas social media. Other social media platforms are much more diverse than Reddit. Twitter, TikTok, and Insta for example. YouTube and Facebook too.

Most people here in Lemmy come from Reddit. Reddit is very popular in the Western world. It's not popular outside of it.

In the context of the larger Fediverse, I think Misskey is an interesting case study. It's created and designed by Japanese people. The docs are in Japanese. It's sponsored by a Japanese company. Resources and support are also in Japanese. Therefore it has a strong Japanese userbase.

On the other hand, Lemmy is created and designed by Western people. The docs are in English. It's sponsored by a Western company. Resources and support are in English. Therefore it has a strong Western userbase.

Also I should point out that other than Twitter, Instagram, etc. there are some platforms operated by non-Western companies. China has a lot of those like Bilibili, Weibo, Baidu, etc. Korea has Katalk and Line, etc etc. They aren't popular outside of the region.

edit: I should probably clarify. It's not like we don't use Reddit. It's just not as popular.

I am from South East Asia, and as far as I know, the only one here.

I think the main reason is because the vast majority of Lemmings are former Redditors so Lemmy is popular where Reddit is popular

Lemmy is small. It's like local shop a few blocks away from a Walmart.

Social media in general (as we think of it) is much more popular in western nations. Thats not to say those outside the west don't use social media, but it tends to be much more dominated by group-chats (IE WhatsApp, Telegram) and by more isolated platforms or sections of platforms. Of the social media platforms we'll be familiar with, it tends to be mostly just the most popular and established ones like Instagram, Facebook, and now Tiktok, rather than something still relatively niche and nerdy like Reddit (nonetheless Lemmy).

All that said, again, this is a massive oversimplification talking broadly about trends. We're talking about thousands of different cultures in entirely different countries and enviroments.

I'm from the Philippines, a country in Southeast Asia.

I would also like to chime in regarding how the community is quite small, there are two (large-ish) Canadian instances but despite this there isn't really a large francophone population here from what I've seen.

I think the western-anglo bias is in part because the community requires people to host the servers, for the community to even exist in the first place. Smaller regions (such as franco-canada, French speakers only making up ~24% of our population) will make up a smaller portion of the user base and likely found out about the App through other English-language resources.

Mastodon has a bit of a larger more diverse community, but it also has had the benefit of many more years of larger (but still niche) usage and arguably more severe issues with X formerly known as Twitter becoming a hell-hole.

Asians use Misskey

Hello, reporting from Singapore :)

I'm from an East Asian country. :) Pretty sure I'm almost the only one tho..

@MemmingenFan923
Still western, but I sometimes see posts coming from the Brazilian lemmy.eco.br

Welp, if one of the Trump's cluster fuck of cabinet morons post something incriminating on Lemmy, they might see the popularity that Signal is seeing... Not that would be a good thing for the US necessarily, but just a new fucking joke for the rest of the world. Still cannot believe the level of incopetence.