this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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And the argument always was that Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/whatever are American.
Well, Lemmy is not. So there's no reason for it to be americanised by default.
(Unless we'll hear the argument that the internet is American :p)
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.
Actually (!) the majority of Reddit users are not American. Although Americans make up the largest single group, they’re in the minority overall.
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.
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.
But that is the thing, this assumption is most likely not correct. The second half of it is (which you didn't mention in your original comment), but the first part is largely untrue.
People who speak English as a second language are able to engage with a platform in which the majority of users speak English. People who only speak English or that and their local language are unable to engage with a platform where the language used is not their own or English.
More people are able to communicate with a shared language than with languages which are not mutually understood.
One other factor contributes: the U.S. has a large population which shares both a language and some culture. While multiple other countries may share languages, the populations which share a similar level of culture are smaller.
Then you have posts on social media being ranked in some way by engagement. One post may be relatable to 100k people, and five other posts are relatable to 20k each. The single post is ranked higher.
Your assumptions are incorrect. There never were a vast majority of American users, and English based sites doesn't necessarily attract people who speak English as their primary language. The world knows (except for perhaps some Americans) that English is the lingua franca of our day, so English being used in a website doesn't say anything at all about its geographical or cultural makeup.
It is a stupid argument anyway that fundamentally ignores the entire concept of the internet being global and universal. If a site is aimed at a global userbase it is mostly completely irrelevant (except for legal purposes of course) where that site was originally created or where the servers are located.
Well, Al Gore said he invented it, so...
That was never the argument, the internet was always international and not just American.
The issue is language, the assumption is English spoken content is assumed to be American or possibly british/Australian.
I'd like to see that get more fluid, but that probably involves a lot of people speaking more English or more autotranslate kicking in.
Unfortunately it was an argument often repeated on Reddit. Stupid, but, whatever. But definitely can't do that with Lemmy.