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 ( [email protected] ), states/cities like [email protected] or even [email protected] (while [email protected] 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
You don’t have to share the view of others, but can you understand how claiming generic names like ‘bears’ and ‘politics’ for something regional is annoying? Bears and politics exist in other countries, too.
No, I don’t care at all. If I want to speak to Romanians, I go on r/Romania, r/RoCasual, etc. etc.
We are only 20 million people. Americans are 330 million, and its an English speaking site. I don’t expect to see Romanians catered to in any way what so ever in the generic subs.
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.
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?
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.
Your assumptions are incorrect. There never were a vast majority of American users, and English based sites doesn’t necessarily attract people who speak English as their primary language. The world knows (except for perhaps some Americans) that English is the lingua franca of our day, so English being used in a website doesn’t say anything at all about its geographical or cultural makeup.
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.
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.
But that is the thing, this assumption is most likely not correct. The second half of it is (which you didn’t mention in your original comment), but the first part is largely untrue.
People who speak English as a second language are able to engage with a platform in which the majority of users speak English. People who only speak English or that and their local language are unable to engage with a platform where the language used is not their own or English.
More people are able to communicate with a shared language than with languages which are not mutually understood.
One other factor contributes: the U.S. has a large population which shares both a language and some culture. While multiple other countries may share languages, the populations which share a similar level of culture are smaller.
Then you have posts on social media being ranked in some way by engagement. One post may be relatable to 100k people, and five other posts are relatable to 20k each. The single post is ranked higher.
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.
It’s americans assuming everything must be about the US and everyone they’re talking to understands US terms or even is from there.
Like using state acronyms with no context and assuming ppl will know what it means. Or random cardinal directions when there’s no country context. The whole thing likely exists because of the insane cultural bubble US education and media perpetuates combined with many people on the english speaking internet actually being from there.
Oh and also many of the people on reddit complaining about it were utterly unable to see when there was context implying it’s about the US so they weren’t really better.
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.
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.
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.
I did not write that you broke a rule because there is no such rule but the intend of feddit.de is spelled out in the first sentence. Just as Lemmy.WORLD intends to be a worldwide community (“Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.”), there is no rule that forbids /c/politics not being about US politics only.
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.
Or may be they should be in a “sport instance”, so people who are not interested in sport can block whole sport instance?
Or that, yes. In fact, there is one: https://fanaticus.social/ and it also annoys everyone with its bots posting about every match, so I need to block every darn community manually.
I don’t see a problem with blocking an entire instance, if it’s focused on something I don’t care about. People are constantly asking about blocking lemmynsfw, and things like burgit are just defederated by almost everyone outright.
General instances are great, but for many things specific ones make more sense. There are instances focused on books, movies, sciences, or countries, so that people who care about those things can visit, and those who don’t, don’t need to keep seeing oddball posts about something from the other side of the world. (Or they can, if they want to.)
Hi, I’m an admin at fanaticus.social. Sorry for the inconvenience! Game bots are an important way for us sports fans to interact with one another during games but I understand how annoying they can be if you don’t care about the sport.
Here's a list of the communities that currently have a game bots running:
If you're comfortable with coding, there's an API endpoint to block a community. I threw together a little python script that would block all the above (I think 🙂).
In the future, we are planning on adding the game bots for the other major sports as well (they’re not in season now) but hopefully that will be a nice jumping off point for you.
All good, I don’t begrudge you, since I saw that the instance has regular discussions and not just bots. I’m just hoping for instance blocking functionality from Lemmy itself. There’s no difference between posts from your bots and other instances that I don’t personally care for.
Maybe you can convince people that run US sports communities on general instances to move to your instance? 😁
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
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Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
The US-defaultism that happens on the internet is very annoying
The US! Oppressing everything else in the world since…the beginning!
Damn americans, they ruined america!
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…
That’s right! Put dollars in the chicken recipe!
Anyway that’s my two cents.
Let’s say 2/100 of your country’s primary monetary unit. No reason to be US centric.
Pounds mass or pounds force? 😅
Freedom! Pounds of Freedom!
I added 3 tbs lead but it tastes kinda funny
Do you plan on cooking in space?
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 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.
You don’t have to share the view of others, but can you understand how claiming generic names like ‘bears’ and ‘politics’ for something regional is annoying? Bears and politics exist in other countries, too.
No, I don’t care at all. If I want to speak to Romanians, I go on r/Romania, r/RoCasual, etc. etc.
We are only 20 million people. Americans are 330 million, and its an English speaking site. I don’t expect to see Romanians catered to in any way what so ever in the generic subs.
Ich bin ein Amerikaner
We’re all living in Amerika
Amerika ist wunderbar
I intentionally used one based in Switzerland. Like my email and VPN needs.
Why Switzerland specifically?
The Swiss Alps will protect his online data.
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.
I mean pretty much every website is US focused unless stated otherwise.
Isn’t that the problem being stated in the OP haha.
To be fair, they are to thank for the internet, so I guess it makes sense…
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 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.
Your assumptions are incorrect. There never were a vast majority of American users, and English based sites doesn’t necessarily attract people who speak English as their primary language. The world knows (except for perhaps some Americans) that English is the lingua franca of our day, so English being used in a website doesn’t say anything at all about its geographical or cultural makeup.
Actually (!) the majority of Reddit users are not American. Although Americans make up the largest single group, they’re in the minority overall.
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.
But that is the thing, this assumption is most likely not correct. The second half of it is (which you didn’t mention in your original comment), but the first part is largely untrue.
People who speak English as a second language are able to engage with a platform in which the majority of users speak English. People who only speak English or that and their local language are unable to engage with a platform where the language used is not their own or English.
More people are able to communicate with a shared language than with languages which are not mutually understood.
One other factor contributes: the U.S. has a large population which shares both a language and some culture. While multiple other countries may share languages, the populations which share a similar level of culture are smaller.
Then you have posts on social media being ranked in some way by engagement. One post may be relatable to 100k people, and five other posts are relatable to 20k each. The single post is ranked higher.
That was never the argument, the internet was always international and not just American.
The issue is language, the assumption is English spoken content is assumed to be American or possibly british/Australian.
I’d like to see that get more fluid, but that probably involves a lot of people speaking more English or more autotranslate kicking in.
Unfortunately it was an argument often repeated on Reddit. Stupid, but, whatever. But definitely can’t do that with Lemmy.
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.
Well, Al Gore said he invented it, so…
ShitAmericansSay
If they were wrong people wouldn’t be complaining about US defaultism.
‘US defaultism’ seems to be a term created and used exclusively by Reddit. Is it people assuming they’re talking to an american online?
It’s americans assuming everything must be about the US and everyone they’re talking to understands US terms or even is from there.
Like using state acronyms with no context and assuming ppl will know what it means. Or random cardinal directions when there’s no country context. The whole thing likely exists because of the insane cultural bubble US education and media perpetuates combined with many people on the english speaking internet actually being from there.
Oh and also many of the people on reddit complaining about it were utterly unable to see when there was context implying it’s about the US so they weren’t really better.
It’s true tho. Every person speaking American online is a spiritual immigrant of the US.
Well beehaw.org is hosted in NYC.
I thought beehaw.org is US based.
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.
If it is, they aren’t doing much to advertise it or to attract those kinds of communities.
Nah, lemm.ee is hosted in the EU.
The .ee must stand for European Eunion
Well it’s certainly not for Emerican Empire.
Lemmy.ca exists for Canada too. There are dozens of us. Dozens!
That must be the most polite server on Lemmy.
Sorry
It might be because most of us Americans lick the boots of corporations for free or get in line to.
Don’t forget about subscription services for everything!
Speaking of which, [email protected]
I like my life for rent!
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?
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.
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.
I did not write that you broke a rule because there is no such rule but the intend of feddit.de is spelled out in the first sentence. Just as Lemmy.WORLD intends to be a worldwide community (“Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.”), there is no rule that forbids /c/politics not being about US politics only.
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.
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.
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.
Or that, yes. In fact, there is one: https://fanaticus.social/ and it also annoys everyone with its bots posting about every match, so I need to block every darn community manually.
I don’t see a problem with blocking an entire instance, if it’s focused on something I don’t care about. People are constantly asking about blocking lemmynsfw, and things like burgit are just defederated by almost everyone outright.
General instances are great, but for many things specific ones make more sense. There are instances focused on books, movies, sciences, or countries, so that people who care about those things can visit, and those who don’t, don’t need to keep seeing oddball posts about something from the other side of the world. (Or they can, if they want to.)
Hi, I’m an admin at fanaticus.social. Sorry for the inconvenience! Game bots are an important way for us sports fans to interact with one another during games but I understand how annoying they can be if you don’t care about the sport.
Here's a list of the communities that currently have a game bots running:
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
If you're comfortable with coding, there's an API endpoint to block a community. I threw together a little python script that would block all the above (I think 🙂).
In the future, we are planning on adding the game bots for the other major sports as well (they’re not in season now) but hopefully that will be a nice jumping off point for you.
All good, I don’t begrudge you, since I saw that the instance has regular discussions and not just bots. I’m just hoping for instance blocking functionality from Lemmy itself. There’s no difference between posts from your bots and other instances that I don’t personally care for.
Maybe you can convince people that run US sports communities on general instances to move to your instance? 😁
I’m sure trying! Content is king though so that’s what we’re focusing on with the game bots.
Of course the Germans have have everything all organized.
Ja natürlich :)
Na klar! 😁
That’s what we love about them. And the accent when they speak English. And their cars. Not forgetting their tools. Beer.
Brandschutz 👍
I mean you can just have your feed show only the stuff you’re subscribed to…
lemmy.world is not the US instance? 😱 🦅🦅🦅
I can totally see it happening. “World? What do you mean world beyond America? That’s the same thing!”