Is there any reason why there is no large generalist Lemmy instance managed from the USA? Is this just a coincidence?
Is there any reason why there is no large generalist Lemmy instance managed from the USA? Is this just a coincidence?
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
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
I would just like to say, thank to all instance admins for the incredible foresight
Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing since the EU had better data privacy laws?
-USAmerican
Indeed, but an American admin team could still manage an instance hosted elsewhere.
I have considered doing this, but I am perfectly happy with sopuli.
Midwest.Socisl
Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).
Interesting. This actually puts into question why certain subs does not have countries assigned. Like news should be news, not a one country spesific news.
Last I checked, the Fediverse as a whole is kind of an European thing. Across the pond, nobody really cares. They have a very different understanding of privacy and freedom and therefore no real desire to use some decentralized crap with shitty UI and broken federation when there’s a perfectly good alternative out there that just works™️
Sure, it's either everyone cares, or no one cares. No in between. Dude.
Look at the statistics. US has 1K servers. Thats 1 server per 340 000 people. France has 1 server per 82 000 people. Germany has 1 server per 114 000 people. See where I'm going with this?
I looked up lemmy.ml out of interest (I realise you aren't classifying it as generalist). Anyway: it says that the server is in France.
Also, if you're able to lookup by IP instead of URL, you can bypass any CloudFlare confusion, and confirm that LW is hosted in Finland.
Cloudflare will proxy DNS requests as well, by the way, so I’m not sure how you would get the IP address if all of their host names are proxied through Cloudflare
Hmmm. I'd imagine that's essential for cloudflare to work. You can get their IP addresses if you have a server that is federated with them and you look in your nginx logs (so that 'if' is a big IF).
Also
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
Unrelated question: new instance, is it yours?
Yeah - it's what I use for testing stuff (it's a bit underpowered though: 1 core CPU, 1 GB Ram). I made that comment partly to verify how it would be announced back to me from .world (except I forgot to subscribe first). Anyway, now mastodon.social is aware of me, and is very keen on telling me about accounts that have been deleted (I swear that site has deleted more accounts that could ever have been created).
I never missed a US instance because LW is so US focused I assumed it was the main one.
We don’t need a US instance, we need more users to support active local communities.
.World not being hosted in the US is news to me (as an American member of it, no less). It's definitely welcome news, though!
With a tld ending like .world you'd think it's for the whole world, not just europe (.eu) or a specific country.
feddit.org itself is a bit of a curiosity since the .org doesn't make it obvious that it is German - but someone posted the full story of how feddit.de fell apart and feddit.org became the successor.
But then if any LW community are going to become US specific from now due to the political climate, should people not interested in that just move elsewhere?
Example: [email protected] , all the recent posts are about the US elections
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.
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.
That's a good point.
ive seen a bit of chatter about not trusting US hosting providers. also, prolly more expensive (conjecture).
Isn't Lemmy.World based in the US?
Edit: huh. Netherlands.
I thought it was in Finland.
Dutch admin using a Finnish VPS from a German hosting company
Since they run their site through Clownflare, it looks like they are hosted in the US, but their server is actually in Finland (at least as far as I know, might have changed recently).
Small correction: slrpnk.net is hosted in Portugal and not Germany, but we do have a German speaking admin and our founder is Italian.
Thank you!
I think a part of it is that english is just the default language and strongly leans american already, so there's just no demand for a USA instance and people just use the popular or thematic ones for that content. There's no advantage in laws to prefer US hosting.
The country ones make sense because they're also a different language, like jlai.lu in french, and the feddits for European languages.
I'm in the US and was specifically drawn toward European instance because my (admittedly very lightly informed) understanding is Europe just has better laws on internet freedoms. IIRC a US-based Mastodon instance (Mastodon maybe?) was seized by cops at one point for pretty questionable reasons. Our legal system gives far too much power to police and corporations to enact spurious searches and punishment.
But if there were, say, an analog to [email protected] but for USA, that would free up other communities to not be dominated so much by content from & for it.
e.g. if someone wanted to flee a state that did not provide abortion to one that did, they could ask the country specific one.
Though super good point that even so, perhaps it should not be hosted inside the country, especially given recent events.
In the current context, seems like [email protected] is the way to go
fedia.io, which is mbin, is us based
*mbin
cheers
Pretty sure midwest.social is run by an Ohio Nazi.
What makes you think so? It seems rather openly "leftist" at least for US standards.
.world is more or less an American instance in all but name.
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]?
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.
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.
I've tried to bring up a Lemmy Instance but the instructions and documentation just are not clear. I want to bring it up with the instance itself not on the same server as the web server and the database, but it wires everything to localhost.
mbin is pretty modular. you can totally segment services if you know what youre doin... in fact part of the reason i chose it, for scaling.
I think you're missing Lemmy.world.
Easily the biggest, and US based.The founder is Dutch, it's hosted in Finland, and the hosting company is German
