It's weird that there isn't a US-specific Lemmy instance (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by WhoRoger@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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A ton of countries have a decently active Lemmy instance, including the English-speaking ones (UK, AUS, NZ, ZA).

The closest to a US one that I know of is midwest.social, which looks pretty lively from what I can tell.

Anyway, so lemmy.world is becoming quite populated with all kinds of US-specific stuff, like communities for sports teams, sometimes with generic names that could be used for other things ( !bears@lemmy.world ), states/cities like !texas@lemmy.world or even !politics@lemmy.world (while !uspolitics@lemmy.world also exists), with other instances also having duplicate comms.

I'm expecting Lemmy to have, at some point, and hopefully soon, an option to block entire instances so that we don't have to see posts especially that are country-specific. But I'll need to block all the baseball teams one by one if I want to browse all and try to find new things.

And I'm sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.

So, please someone make one? Or navigate people to the right one? Thank yooou

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[-] Andreas@feddit.dk 10 points 1 year ago

And I'm sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.

I'm trying to advertise my country's instance, feddit.nu (Sweden). feddit.de got a headstart with Germans by having been created before the Reddit migration and providing the first federated community discovery tool.

Instances that were created after the migration started on the other hand? It's frustrating with Redditor behavior, because they expect the Lemmy community to share the same name as the Reddit community (/r/Sweden) and only subscribe to communities that use the same name.

If you don't want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can't understand, please make sure to annoy their users about it as much as possible, in English, that they should move to the country-specific instances instead of centralizing on lemmy.world. It's healthier for the Fediverse in general with everyone on many instances, in the long run.

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

New instances have it super hard in general. This is an issue the Lemmy system needs to resolve somehow.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

This is an issue the Lemmy system needs to resolve somehow.

Once you introduce anything that resembles an discovery algorithm, some people will lose their mind.

[-] Andreas@feddit.dk 1 points 1 year ago

It's difficult to come up with an onboarding solution that doesn't give overwhelming power to the hands of a few people (who operate the onboarding platform), leading to centralization again.

If everyone was directed to one central onboarding platform, the operators could choose to advertise and censor instances as they saw fit – which is why I don't recommend potential Mastodon users to the join-mastodon.org server picker, because all of the instances there are hand-picked by mastodon.social admins.

I didn't expect security and outage threats to be the factor that keeps big instances in check, but I'm kind of glad for it.

[-] kplaceholder@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you don't want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can't understand

Mastodon has a feature where you can set which language a post is in, and a setting in your account where you can select which languages you want to see. Is this not viable for Lemmy?

Edit: Nevermind, I just found out this feature is in Lemmy as well 😅

[-] Andreas@feddit.dk 2 points 1 year ago

The feature is there, but it's glitchy. Whenever I try to post with a language tag to lemmy.world and other big instances, the post screen stays loading forever and the post is never submitted. It only goes through when I remove the language tag, so I avoid posting non-English content on lemmy.world because I can't tag it...

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It is, but everyone just has it set to undetermined, because I don't think you can set the default language you write in, so you'd need to set it with every post and comment.

(Or am I wrong?)