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Is there any reason why there is no large generalist Lemmy instance managed from the USA? Is this just a coincidence? (feddit.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

feddit.uk
jlai.lu
feddit.dk
szmer.info
lemmy.eco.br
feddit.cl
feddit.it

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

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

.world is more or less an American instance in all but name.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Which is ironic as the Ruud, the founder, is Dutch

https://fedihosting.foundation/lw-team/#org-chart

It always surprises me that [email protected] is specifically US-only. Why not [email protected]?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I did not know that .world was made by a Dutch person. Thanks for teaching me something new.

.world seems to have been the default instance people went to when they left reddit. It's more or less than mentality imported into Lemmy. This led to the fact that creating a US specific instance is not necessary. .world fills that niche enough.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

That's probably it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

If Lemmy and other fediverse discussion areas had developed slower and more naturally there might have been more of a country/instance symmetry, but anyone who was around when the Reddit implosion and migration happened knows that it was total chaos and a grab bag of where a new user should sign up. Lemmy and the rest were not ready for such a shift, and now that everyone's been in a place or two for a while, short of a closure or blocking or whatever there's no reason to move around to a matching country and instance, if there even is one. People mainly look for popularity, activity, themes, and engagement, and if that's found on the other side of the globe it works.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Probably trying to mirror Reddit, which had /r/politics for US, and /r/worldnews for everything else. There was a lot of effort (probably wrongly) to try and copy Reddit over instead of finding new ways to do things. /r/worldpolitics was the original sub, but there's an interesting drama story there.