Is it? Or is it a question of which communities you’re looking at? Because mine isn’t.
Yes, you can set that up. But most news communities such as /world, /worldnews, /news, and others are very US-centric. I wonder why that has to be the case when it should be clear to everyone by now that the White House is employing troll tactics.
Because the USA has so much military and economic power that it is the axis about which the English-speaking world turns. And it is making wildly stupid choices in its foreign and domestic policies, which gets peoples attention from both potential impacts to their own countries and out of sheer horror and exasperation. Finally, it has a huge population relative to any other english speaking nation, and its citizens will tend to vote as a bloc about things they find interesting. And the things they find interesting will typically involve their own nation. Germans, for example, will do this too - but there are far fewer germans than americans, so in an open market, American news gets the most votes from its citizens and ends up on top of the stack.
This is what I wanted to suggest. There’s just a lot of news happening in America right now, and because of America’s position in the western world that news has widespread implications.
Politics in America are also very dramatic, so the stories might drive more engagement from people into that sort of thing.
Greatest show on earth, bby!
I don’t know for other countries, but I read French news in French. So the French instance is way smaller than the English speaking ones
Would that be J Lai Lu? And how would you make it show more often in your feed and us news show less often? That’s the kind of balance I’d like to get, useful us news about once a day and useful French news about once a day, instead of 10x of same Epstein news and 0 French/whatever
That’s why we moved our french communities there, on jlai.lu. so if you have a jlai.lu account, you can set your timeline to local and then every news will be french.
There is another solution : PieFed. With PieFed account, you can subcribe to the flux i created :
- https://piefed.social/f/cafe_fr (a cosy place where news are removed)
- https://piefed.social/f/actu_fr (there is also canada, swiss and belgium. For the worst news, such us US, gaza…are in Actualités difficiles)
- https://piefed.social/f/peertube_fr (a curratod list of french peertube content)
- https://piefed.social/f/societe_fr (for feminism, 0 waste, less cars, deaf…)
Oh i forgot, on piefed, we have a keyword filter. You can add trump, musk, eipstein and then ask piefed to hide or blur those posts.
I hope it helped ya somehow :)
I appreciate all the info, unfortunately there’s several things that confuse me.
What’s piefed, is this an instance or an app?
What do I do if I want Australia, France and a few other countries, do I need accounts in multiple instances? How do I find them? Can I have all of their posts collated simultaneously in my racoon app?
What’s a flux?
Is there a book “Lemmy for Dummies”? Or perhaps a ted talk course to teach me basics?
Typical dismissive answer that I see on here. You know very well US political BS has infiltrated most communities by now.
Not in my experience. If you don’t want to see politics there is a robust blocking system on Connect (and other apps I’m sure) that you can use.
Because Americans are louder and tend not to confine their activities to the country-specific forums
As an American, I can say one of our defining characteristics is we believe we belong everywhere on the Internet. There is no space that we are embarrassed to enter. Reminds me of the Americans showing up on Chinese social media and acting like they owned the place.
As an american, I don’t see a problem with this.
yeah, I want to hear more about which of your former ministers have shit themselves at McDonalds!
The US population is grouped together in one giant pool instead of spread out by state like Europe is grouped by individual country. We focus on national news that affects the large population, and stuff that happens on other states becsuse of the shared identity, while European countries don’t have the same kind of European Union shenanigans that affect all of Europe and mostly post about country level stuff. Communities in languages other than English also tend to be posted in separate communites further separating their discussions from the general purpose communities.
We are also louder, which also contributes, but that is not as big of a deal as the sheer numbers.
plus, you know, inheritors of the British empire - practically an unbroken chain of hegemonic anglophones who refuse to learn another language
While a huge portion of the population chooses not to become fluent in a language, because nearly everything within hundreds of miles of where they live uses the same language by default, we still provide opportunities to learn languages and in some areas people are commonly bilingual.
It can be hard to maintain a language without frequent exposure. I had some classes in Spanish and French, but without a large population that speaks either language in my area I just forgot it over time. Moved tons place where we do have a lot of people who speak Spanish and English, but since I’m not part of their community my exposure is limited to the occasional festival or signage as nobody needs me to impose my attempt to learn their language on them.
It isn’t all about refusal, it is mostly lack of exposure.
Have you seen the shitstorm we’re (U.S.) in? We’re like the worst car crash you’ve ever seen and then the ambulance also crashes then the fire truck blows up and then aliens come down and start attacking…kinda hard to look away.
You forgot the train derailment and plane crash…
I thought I understood US politics…even if it was by osmosis given the sheer volume we’re exposed to…but lately I felt like I only understood the dem half…after the election I’m not sure and by now I have this “there is no hope of understanding this mess, different culture, different values” that I get from trying to understand Indian politics.
I mean honestly this is the most deranged and worst it’s been in my … at least adult lifetime. I think a lot of the political mess we’re in is tied into our appetite for some pretty terrible pop culture. Yes, yes, we have moral and intelligent and sane people here too, but the way that we have leaned in so hard to trashy reality television, infuencers, anything to grab your attention and reward it monetarily…hell we have a reality tv president. It’s not the only reason I think we’re in the mess, but I think we’ve been primed to accept more and more outrageous behavior cause we’ve always been over the top and big and loud. I always assumed I’d live in a democracy, it was just a given. This is the first time I’m doubting it.
In pretty sure my instance is based in Germany, or somewhere in Europe at least. That doesn’t really matter. You can belong to an instance hosted anywhere, and also I don’t trust data privacy at all in the US so I’d rather not have my home instance be hosted here.
Presumably somewhere close enough that they don’t want to risk breaking UK law as it’s blocked here. Not sure if any other instances will follow. I think all of lemmy is probably against UK law now. Hope we will always have some instances or its small enough to get ignored.
There are just more of us than any single EU country.
I assume its because people love watching train wrecks.
Can confirm. Season 5 is off to a great start. 🍿
I heard a rumor that half way through season 5 there is going to be a surprise change in cast.
There are 27 countries in the EU, there is only one USA. Most people don’t seem to care about each other’s national happenings.
That’s so fascinating.
As an American, only peak news from Mexico and Canada gets on my radar. I don’t know shit about Brazil, Cuba, etc. and with my shit American education system, I can’t even name the South American countries.
So if you’re in Italy, you don’t give a shit about Austria, Switzerland, or France and their big news?
Yes, we do.
I remember in primary school that we were tasked with learning the names and capitals of all countries on the planet, continent for continent, so there is an early taught awareness of all countries, as well as a culture for backpacking, experiencing and adapting to other cultures. As a Norwegian, most news here are about here, and only major headlines from other countries are mentioned in the news, like the upcoming doctors strike in UK in the news today or the power outage in Spain a while back. Some more news from Sweden though, as it is our closest neighbour and the country we visit the most.
Maybe it has to do with your language settings as well? I imagine filtering out English will make your experience much less US-centric.
Filtering out English is a bad idea because 80% (no quote just an estimation) of the content here is written in English.
Yes, that is the implication I was making to answer the original question. The majority of content here is in English–>the majority of English-first users are from the US–>this is why Lemmy seems so US-centric.
I was being a little obtuse because it’s like a French-filtered user asking why social media seems so France-centric even though there’s lots of social media in Africa–there are other languages that people use that you’re not necessarily seeing on your feed.
That is not the reality though. The majority of English-first users is a quite irrelevant statistic, since a majority of people from non-English speaking countries still uses English on the internet outside of their specific national environments. The majority of English speakers on the internet are non-Americans, so it explains nothing about why the English language (international) areas of lemmy are US-centric.
Presumably you’re browsing english-language Lemmy
Most people are going to want to converse in their native/primary language, and by numbers that means a lot of Americans who are, of course, primarily concerned with American issues
There’s also the fact that America is a huge player on the international stage, so American issues can have a lot of repercussions in other countries
And if you haven’t noticed, America has kind of a lot of shit going on and there is a lot to talk about there.
Kind of a natural thing to happen, french lemmy (and reddit) is very france focused in much the same way.
Because the Europeans post in their weirdo languages.
Nee hoor, dat doen wij helemaal niet!
Waar heb je het over?
Nem
É raro mas acontece.
Kamo sreće
NEIN
The US is the largest English-speaking country by far and this post is in English. Switch to another language and you’ll see less US stuff.
That has nothing to do with anything. You will obviously not be aware of it, but by far the greater majority of English speakers you encounter on the internet are not actually from an English speaking country, and definitely not from the US. That is because English functions as the lingua franca of the internet, so we have to use English to be mutually understood.
My guess is because the US is a dumpster fire that is exploding right now, and let’s be honest: who doesn’t slow down to “rubber neck” a dumpster fire when they’re passing by?
Once we’ve completely fallen on our asses, and worn ourselves out crying like little babies, I’m sure the noise will subside.
Until then you probably want to get a lemmy client that supports keyword filtering and you can at least lessen the noise a little.
~As an American, I don’t know if “rubber necking” is a known colloquialism outside of the US. So, if you don’t know, it’s a term used to refer to the assholes on the road who slow down to gawk at traffic accidents as if they’ve never seen one before; very, very annoying.~
Everyone slows down to watch the car wreck.
