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
Looking ahead, one difficulty might be that I don’t think that existed on Reddit (or if it did, surely it wasn’t well-known).
And the community sidebar is quite hidden on Lemmy especially from mobile apps. Creating a post presumes that you know exactly where you’ll send it, without e.g. offering alternative solutions. I thought that Hexbear might be able to shunt posts made from one community over to another, but that probably took a modified codebase.
Oh, I see a !askmidwest@midwest.social.
Anyway if you see that there’s enough demand for it (I haven’t looked myself) then that sounds great!:-)
Open !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world and behold the 20 questions asked regarding US politics