This is so bizarre that while living in Kyiv I get the news in my country while reading Lemmy, not the local news sites. Yesterday I got a Google News recommendation from one of the Ukrainian news portals "Economic News" about a female singer who had a divorce. Instaban, like all the other local news portals.
Lemmy is much better at sorting out what's really interesting. Especially since so far nerds form a sizeable portion of its users.
You know what - the new release of Lemmy, 0.18.5, should have Ukrainian interface language. So we will be able to create a lot of topical Ukrainian communities - including those focused on local news. With enough intelligent people, they will be better than any commercial news aggregators.