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?

  • deegeese
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    8 hours ago

    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.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      .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!

          • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
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            6 hours ago

            That confuses me too. I’ve never really understood that. Likewise, /m/news is for US news while world news goes into /m/world and US news isn’t allowed.

            Maybe that’s another reason why folks thing it’s US-based - because the magazines are clearly so US oriented. But I’m not sure how that happened.

            On the brain bin for example it’s PoliticsUSA - https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticsUSA

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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              6 hours ago

              Maybe that’s another reason why folks thing it’s US-based - because the magazines are clearly so US oriented. But I’m not sure how that happened.

              Probably people creating the community soon after the instance creation

      • deegeese
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        7 hours ago

        American culture has and likely always will dominate any general audience English speaking online community. It’s just a matter of population.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          7 hours ago

          Doubt it will keep being the case in a couple of decades given the demography of China, India and Africa once they are all developed enough to produce as much media as the USA today.

          • cm0002@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            dominate any general audience English speaking online community

            China, India, Africa and others will probably develop to the point of “producing as much media as the USA”, but I highly doubt they’ll simultaneously make a major shift to English for it

            • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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              6 hours ago

              I think NA+EU+Commonwealth will remain an interesting rich market, so they will make it accessible to them, like the recent Chinese video game Black Myth Wukong, for example. Also India already produces a lot of movies with English version, and there are large parts of high demographic growth countries speaking English in Africa, for example Nigeria, projected to be 500M of people by the end of this century.

                • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                  2 hours ago

                  Good point, but I think it’s possible Indian and Nigerian, for example, user generated English content, will compete with USA’s. Cultural bubbles may remain, but the internet in some ways also make them more porous.

                  • deegeese
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                    2 hours ago

                    When Indians want to chat online, I don’t think they’ll speak English with other Indians.