One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231
Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it’s specifically country-named and focused.
If you aren’t too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.
I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you’ve told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I’m just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.
Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I’ve found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I’m helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I’m trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)
Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let’s see what the admins say.
Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let’s hope Discuss.online can become “the one”, but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy
I am more fearful that as the USA grows more towards fascism that any USA-based instance may become less stable. e.g. if Project 2025 really does outlaw porn, can all of Lemmy be labelled as “porn” due to the presence of a NSFW post or two, and thereby be taken down? Perhaps people wanting to be admins can volunteer their time to help out other instances across the world without owning any instances within the USA borders? Though the need to have spaces where left-leaning people can communicate with one another will grow all the more as a result.
To be, the issue was never that no major instance was USA-based, location of the servers doesn’t mean much nowadays. It was more about the fact that no large instance was geared towards USA citizens (a la Lemmy.ca, as we discussed), with a message such as “a USA instance, for USA citizens, but everyone is welcome”. That hypothetical server being hosted in Canada or Europe wouldn’t have that much of an impact, it was more to be able to have politics, finance, news discussions related to the USA in one place
Oh yes, totally agreed there, I just presumed that such would most naturally arise from inside the USA itself. Then again, isn’t feddit.uk based in Germany? All it would take would be for someone to start it up, and begin attracting new users to it - though neither of those are small tasks, even if it could share hardware with another instance, such as feddit.uk? So if Discuss.Online were to step up instead, that does seem wonderful news!:-D
I tagged you on my other post - I need to focus more on my job right now, but I’m glad that I can help out that much so that you don’t have to do literally everything:-). It was only after that when I finally discovered this post (b/c previously I had used a browser search for the word hexbear but that only looked at titles), and yet even so I think I covered what jgrim was asking for - actual reasons to do so, not just “hurr me no likey dose others over der”.
If Discuss.Online (DO) were to defederate even only hexbear.net, much less lemmy.ml, I think it would work fantastically well as an option.
That argument pushed against Lemmy.ca (CA) though - I do not agree… mostly. For one, that instance has literally ~1200 MAUs, yet only 21 upvoted that post? And even then, the top community on that instance, mentioned also in that post, is !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K MAUs, which obviously is going to show up quite often in the All feed. The solution to that though is to either browse by Subscribed, or else continue to browse by All yet after blocking unwanted communities. If they had wanted to remain Canada-focused, well that ship has already sailed, long ago.
And it is not the only such community either - !fbstolencontent@lemmy.ca (1.79K) and !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca (1.64K) and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (1.58K) all are geared more towards international (than Canada-only) audiences. That person’s argument was a nonstarted even back then, and since then they have definitely lost - though they can (re-)make the Fediverse into anything that they want by configuring their tools to show only what they are (most) interested in. Tbf, otoh there are also some posts that have a tiny bit of an anti-usa stance, like this one: https://lemmy.ca/post/33447213, though I would hope not a deal-breaker.
The only way to know for sure would be to create a post and ask if the admins were okay with you using their instance as the default recommendation for Redditors to flock to. That would also hold for feddit.org though, or Discuss.Online (if they were amenable to blocking hexbear.net and especially if they would also block lemmy.ml), the latter of which I at least got the ball rolling for you:-).
Reading through their “welcome, new users!” post, I came across this very interesting comment. A lot of comments express similar thoughts. So while I think that DO would be a better match than CA (and I would guess that you agree? again, after HB were defederated), CA would still be a good match overall, imho. Not perfect, but especially considering the lack of any other options.
However, feddit.org (FO?) has even more of an offputting “vibe” imho than CA. First, I mentioned that it sorts by Local rather than All, which exagerates even more the focus on German-speaking than English-speaking ones. While many posts seem attractive to a USA audience - e.g. “‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war” and “History will judge German chancellor Olaf Scholz for not giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the country’s former foreign minister says”, many others would act more as a deterrant e.g. “XXL-Leben: Der Fluch des großen Penis” with pictures of men’s bulging packages not marked NSFW, and a post about Georgia but it’s the country rather than the US state, but mostly I mean that overall on the front-page feed right now I counted and nearly all of the other posts besides those 2 mentioned above (+1 more) are in German. 4 from iech_iel that have the language embedded in an image so not easily machine translatable to other languages.
And even more so than CA that at least has some non-Canadian communities, the communities on FO are even more German- or EU-specific - the top one being !Europe@feddit.org with 3.87K MAUs, which is a bit smaller than !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K, and like even !technik@feddit.org that while not unwelcoming to posts in English, the very name of the community itself looks to be in German, as are a large fraction of the posts therein too. I don’t know how receptive to a large influx of English-speaking Reddit users that FO would be… but just purely from looking at the communities and posts that are already there, I don’t think it’s a good “fit”.
To attempt to be crystal clear, obviously the above is all perfectly fine and people on FO can do however they please (and on the international stage, Georgia is a nation/country, not strictly a USA state:-P) - I am talking here strictly about the “fit” for average Americans.
They don’t block hexbear: https://discuss.online/instances
One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231
Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it’s specifically country-named and focused.
If you aren’t too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.
I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you’ve told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I’m just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.
Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I’ve found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I’m helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I’m trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)
Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let’s see what the admins say.
Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let’s hope Discuss.online can become “the one”, but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy
I am more fearful that as the USA grows more towards fascism that any USA-based instance may become less stable. e.g. if Project 2025 really does outlaw porn, can all of Lemmy be labelled as “porn” due to the presence of a NSFW post or two, and thereby be taken down? Perhaps people wanting to be admins can volunteer their time to help out other instances across the world without owning any instances within the USA borders? Though the need to have spaces where left-leaning people can communicate with one another will grow all the more as a result.
To be, the issue was never that no major instance was USA-based, location of the servers doesn’t mean much nowadays. It was more about the fact that no large instance was geared towards USA citizens (a la Lemmy.ca, as we discussed), with a message such as “a USA instance, for USA citizens, but everyone is welcome”. That hypothetical server being hosted in Canada or Europe wouldn’t have that much of an impact, it was more to be able to have politics, finance, news discussions related to the USA in one place
Oh yes, totally agreed there, I just presumed that such would most naturally arise from inside the USA itself. Then again, isn’t feddit.uk based in Germany? All it would take would be for someone to start it up, and begin attracting new users to it - though neither of those are small tasks, even if it could share hardware with another instance, such as feddit.uk? So if Discuss.Online were to step up instead, that does seem wonderful news!:-D
I tagged you on my other post - I need to focus more on my job right now, but I’m glad that I can help out that much so that you don’t have to do literally everything:-). It was only after that when I finally discovered this post (b/c previously I had used a browser search for the word hexbear but that only looked at titles), and yet even so I think I covered what jgrim was asking for - actual reasons to do so, not just “hurr me no likey dose others over der”.
If Discuss.Online (DO) were to defederate even only hexbear.net, much less lemmy.ml, I think it would work fantastically well as an option.
That argument pushed against Lemmy.ca (CA) though - I do not agree… mostly. For one, that instance has literally ~1200 MAUs, yet only 21 upvoted that post? And even then, the top community on that instance, mentioned also in that post, is !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K MAUs, which obviously is going to show up quite often in the All feed. The solution to that though is to either browse by Subscribed, or else continue to browse by All yet after blocking unwanted communities. If they had wanted to remain Canada-focused, well that ship has already sailed, long ago.
And it is not the only such community either - !fbstolencontent@lemmy.ca (1.79K) and !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca (1.64K) and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (1.58K) all are geared more towards international (than Canada-only) audiences. That person’s argument was a nonstarted even back then, and since then they have definitely lost - though they can (re-)make the Fediverse into anything that they want by configuring their tools to show only what they are (most) interested in. Tbf, otoh there are also some posts that have a tiny bit of an anti-usa stance, like this one: https://lemmy.ca/post/33447213, though I would hope not a deal-breaker.
The only way to know for sure would be to create a post and ask if the admins were okay with you using their instance as the default recommendation for Redditors to flock to. That would also hold for feddit.org though, or Discuss.Online (if they were amenable to blocking hexbear.net and especially if they would also block lemmy.ml), the latter of which I at least got the ball rolling for you:-).
Reading through their “welcome, new users!” post, I came across this very interesting comment. A lot of comments express similar thoughts. So while I think that DO would be a better match than CA (and I would guess that you agree? again, after HB were defederated), CA would still be a good match overall, imho. Not perfect, but especially considering the lack of any other options.
However, feddit.org (FO?) has even more of an offputting “vibe” imho than CA. First, I mentioned that it sorts by Local rather than All, which exagerates even more the focus on German-speaking than English-speaking ones. While many posts seem attractive to a USA audience - e.g. “‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war” and “History will judge German chancellor Olaf Scholz for not giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the country’s former foreign minister says”, many others would act more as a deterrant e.g. “XXL-Leben: Der Fluch des großen Penis” with pictures of men’s bulging packages not marked NSFW, and a post about Georgia but it’s the country rather than the US state, but mostly I mean that overall on the front-page feed right now I counted and nearly all of the other posts besides those 2 mentioned above (+1 more) are in German. 4 from iech_iel that have the language embedded in an image so not easily machine translatable to other languages.
And even more so than CA that at least has some non-Canadian communities, the communities on FO are even more German- or EU-specific - the top one being !Europe@feddit.org with 3.87K MAUs, which is a bit smaller than !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K, and like even !technik@feddit.org that while not unwelcoming to posts in English, the very name of the community itself looks to be in German, as are a large fraction of the posts therein too. I don’t know how receptive to a large influx of English-speaking Reddit users that FO would be… but just purely from looking at the communities and posts that are already there, I don’t think it’s a good “fit”.
To attempt to be crystal clear, obviously the above is all perfectly fine and people on FO can do however they please (and on the international stage, Georgia is a nation/country, not strictly a USA state:-P) - I am talking here strictly about the “fit” for average Americans.
Damn, I’ve hit a character limit:-(.