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
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.
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.
Midwest.Socisl
Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).
Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.
Much love to the slrpnk.net admin team
Thank you!
Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing since the EU had better data privacy laws?
-USAmerican
Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.
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.
.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!
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.
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.
Isn’t Lemmy.World based in the US?
Edit: huh. Netherlands.
Since they run their site through Clownflare, it looks like they are hosted in the US, but their server is actually in Finland (at least as far as I know, might have changed recently).
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.
doesn’t make much difference where your instance is hosted as long as it’s not north korea or something
I was referring to the tendency of US citizens to overtake generically named communities like [email protected]
If LW was managed by a US team, why not, but it’s not so it just seems strange
.world is more or less an American instance in all but name.
Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.
What makes you think so? It seems rather openly “leftist” at least for US standards.
