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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] 69 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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

That's a good point.