It's weird that there isn't a US-specific Lemmy instance
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
I'm just dumb and forget the world wide web is, well, world wide haha. I just live in my own little bubble sometimes but i'm trying to be better about not blindly assuming the folks i interact with on here and other places are from the US
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.
It is a stupid argument anyway that fundamentally ignores the entire concept of the internet being global and universal. If a site is aimed at a global userbase it is mostly completely irrelevant (except for legal purposes of course) where that site was originally created or where the servers are located.
Yeah I assume the reason there isn't is because the general ones are US-centric by default and then everyone else has to have somewhere specific to go. But I guess if they want their own dedicated place too why not?
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.
It's difficult to come up with an onboarding solution that doesn't give overwhelming power to the hands of a few people (who operate the onboarding platform), leading to centralization again.
If everyone was directed to one central onboarding platform, the operators could choose to advertise and censor instances as they saw fit – which is why I don't recommend potential Mastodon users to the join-mastodon.org server picker, because all of the instances there are hand-picked by mastodon.social admins.
I didn't expect security and outage threats to be the factor that keeps big instances in check, but I'm kind of glad for it.
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.
The feature is there, but it's glitchy. Whenever I try to post with a language tag to lemmy.world and other big instances, the post screen stays loading forever and the post is never submitted. It only goes through when I remove the language tag, so I avoid posting non-English content on lemmy.world because I can't tag it...
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.
Nah. What's weird is you thinking everyone should follow your strict rules about national segregation online.
If it's such a problem for you, instead of begging everyone else to fit your narrow world view, go find an instance that works better for you. Or, when you don't because that's ridiculous, make your own and block it off from everyone else not following your rules. Then you might be happy.