this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Ask Lemmy
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But that would be US ExCePtIoNaLiSm!
No, US exceptionalism is turning every single general purpose community into US politics.
For the 4% of Earth's population that does indeed live in the US, there could be local communities.
It's still weird to me that there is no US instance. LW and lemm.ee are hosted in Europe, SJW and lemmy.ca in Canada, lemmy.ml and hexbear use a European datacenter.
I mean there is midwest.social and dubvee, but we could have expected a large US instance to have emerged by now.
The closest is probably https://lemmy.today/, but only has 194 users per month.
There used to be dmv.social, which iirc was in Washington DC? It got shut down due to the CSAM attacks, before the automated software, and iirc just frustration in general with how toxic people were being.
And I see a bunch more actually, at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer. 2 of the top 20 instances even are located in the USA. Lemmy.sdf.org with >500 MAUs, beehaw.org with ~400, StarTrek.website with ~200, lemmy.today, ttrpgnetwork, and discuss.online (where jgrim of SubLinks is an admin) are all recognizable. Ofc, the caveat being if I am reading that page correctly - or like perhaps some proxy was used, even a random one and this data could be all wrong who knows - but it at least looks this way?:-)
Lemmy.sdf.org had a lot of federation issues until recently. They are also very FOSS oriented rather than generic
I don't even consider Beehaw a Lemmy instance anymore as they defederate LW and SJW
I should have probably said "generic US instance", with communities like AskUSA, CasualUS, this kind of things
In looking into why they defederated, it seems due to the poor implementation of moderation tools and the insistence of the largest instances on unregulated signups, which tend to allow trolls to easily evade blocks? Though from Kbin.social, StarTrek.website, Discuss.Online, and now PieFed.social, I have been able to see Beehaw the entire time iirc.:-)
Speaking as one myself, I think Americans tend not to be so proud of our country, especially lately. The enormous exception is ofc conservatives, who don't tend to come here.
Part of the reason might be the ginormous size of just thousands of miles separating coast to coast, and more besides to Alaska or Hawaii etc. And more than merely geography there are the cultural divides, between North vs. South, East vs. West, and Midwest, etc. Though none of those matter even half as much as rural vs. urban.
Liberals (urban) tend to feel part of a global community, while conservatives (rural) turn inwards and want to focus only on ourselves - at which point the liberals don't feel comfortable in such a space, as e.g. X provides. So while there are very good reasons to be, feeling "proud to be an American", especially on a day like today, seems ironically anti-American, if that makes any sense. But yeah, people definitely are going to want to bitch and moan about the election results - as we should - and ironically there too we will do so alongside our global compatriots, in a global community, and probably on an instance outside of the USA since as you said there isn't a large major one that seems all that suitable:-).
What about Lemmy.today? You'd want to check with them first ofc. They don't even have a blocklist at all though - not even the CSAM ones so I don't know how they do that. At a guess it may cause them problems to send so much traffic.
Or perhaps one of the PieFed or Mbin instances? They federate community content the same as any Lemmy instance I thought. Oh but the moderation aspect might make that prohibitive.
It could be really good to have some of those, like AskUSA where people ask what US State they should move to, to get away from lack of abortion care within their own location:-(. Though ironically an educated European may provide better answers than a confident-sounding American spouting off nonsense, as usual!:-)
As you know, I'm not the biggest LW fan, but even I wouldn't use an account defederated from LW, especially with SJW on top. You're missing probably 80% of the active communities, and 15% of the remaining are on lemmy.ml
Even with that, why is there no Californian or New York instance? Seems weird to me seen how populous and tech oriented those places are
Theres a ton of lemmy servers in Cali, but just no official one. Its all just one offs (I support one).
As a lemmy.today user myself (though not American), it's cozy in there!
But the numbers are surprisingly low. It's an instance that is run without donations though, only on the good will of its creator (who refuses donations citing sufficient income to keep it as a hobby project), so I imagine having it big could potentially become a strain.
Damn good thing. We definitely don't want one hosted in a fascist country.
Hey, we won't be fascist for at least another month or two!? 🗓️
Yes, not until Jan. 20th (MLK Day, he'd be so proud!). But it's not like someone's gonna set up a big Lemmy server, then move it to a different country later.