this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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It's weird that there isn't a US-specific Lemmy instance (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by WhoRoger@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] Stovetop@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Stovetop@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.