Why is Lemmy so US-centric? The largest instances are in Europe, aren't they? So why does it have to be US news trolling as if it were Reddit?
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Yes, you can set that up. But most news communities such as /world, /worldnews, /news, and others are very US-centric. I wonder why that has to be the case when it should be clear to everyone by now that the White House is employing troll tactics.
Because the USA has so much military and economic power that it is the axis about which the English-speaking world turns. And it is making wildly stupid choices in its foreign and domestic policies, which gets peoples attention from both potential impacts to their own countries and out of sheer horror and exasperation. Finally, it has a huge population relative to any other english speaking nation, and its citizens will tend to vote as a bloc about things they find interesting. And the things they find interesting will typically involve their own nation. Germans, for example, will do this too - but there are far fewer germans than americans, so in an open market, American news gets the most votes from its citizens and ends up on top of the stack.
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While a huge portion of the population chooses not to become fluent in a language, because nearly everything within hundreds of miles of where they live uses the same language by default, we still provide opportunities to learn languages and in some areas people are commonly bilingual.
It can be hard to maintain a language without frequent exposure. I had some classes in Spanish and French, but without a large population that speaks either language in my area I just forgot it over time. Moved tons place where we do have a lot of people who speak Spanish and English, but since I'm not part of their community my exposure is limited to the occasional festival or signage as nobody needs me to impose my attempt to learn their language on them.
It isn't all about refusal, it is mostly lack of exposure.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeah, the geography certainly plays a role - much like it does for Britain having ~30 miles of ocean between it and the rest of Europe.
But the broad trend in the States has been a narrowing of languages. Like, a century ago there was national distribution for newspapers printed in German. Those started disappearing during WW1 and were completely gone by the end of WW2. And, of course, that is dwarfed by the number of First Nations languages that have been driven to the edge extinction, if not outright extinguished already.
I think if Lemmy wants to have less of a US bent to topics and perspectives, then they'll have to follow ich_iel's example and stubbornly commit to a language that isn't english. The way how the internet collapses geography, conversation trends toward orbiting the densest population of monoglots.
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plus, you know, inheritors of the British empire - practically an unbroken chain of hegemonic anglophones who refuse to learn another language
I am actively working on learning spanish as an American, because I want to be able to speak to people when I go to central and south America.
I have far less interest in learning french or german, because Europe is both expensive to get to for me, and expensive to stay in relative to other places I have equal interest in travelling to. And besides that, if I were to travel to Europe, I've been told that everyone there already speaks english anyway. And besides that, I've been told that even if I try to learn french or german, the locals will just speak to me in English anyway since it is faster for them. Due to this, learning these languages largely becomes an intellectual exercise performed for its own sake. And if I'm going to spend hours doing some sort of intellectual hobby, I could just as easily want to learn to paint or play the guitar or perform statistical analysis on the different varieties of weeds in my back yard.
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Yeah, the geography certainly plays a role - much like it does for Britain having ~30 miles of ocean between it and the rest of Europe.
But the broad trend in the States has been a narrowing of languages. Like, a century ago there was national distribution for newspapers printed in German. Those started disappearing during WW1 and were completely gone by the end of WW2. And, of course, that is dwarfed by the number of First Nations languages that have been driven to the edge extinction, if not outright extinguished already.
I think if Lemmy wants to have less of a US bent to topics and perspectives, then they'll have to follow ich_iel's example and stubbornly commit to a language that isn't english. The way how the internet collapses geography, conversation trends toward orbiting the densest population of monoglots.
It is a self reinforcing system, and the same reason that English has become so widespread worldwide.
Increased communication across wider areas promote common languages to be more accessible to more people, so in the case of the US this means each time people communicate it is more likely to be in English. Sure, some stupid laws have helped out too but this is a trend that was going to happen in the US for the same reasons English is increasingly used worldwide, but we don't have a national language that English is being added to to promote being bilingual. Quebec has been fighting the trend though legislation since it was happening there as well.
Even regional dialects of English are being homogenized within the US. It is less likely for people traveling across many states to be unable to understand a regional dialect as was fairly common before cheap long distance communication.
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As an American, I can say one of our defining characteristics is we believe we belong everywhere on the Internet. There is no space that we are embarrassed to enter. Reminds me of the Americans showing up on Chinese social media and acting like they owned the place.
As an american, I don't see a problem with this.
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Indian is not a language
*any of the 10,000 or so regional dialects of india
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But you are missing out on the Stör memes, and all the ich_iel posts.
I will confess that I don't get the ones about German politicians.
Whenever I see a meme in German, I'm sad I'll never understand it, because I'm definitely not going to the trouble of running it through a translator.
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Maybe native speakers or English only speakers. But over a billion people speak English (approx, per Wikipedia), and US only accounts for a fraction of that.
Sure. But people upvote content about their own nation, and the US is the largest single population of english speakers. Maybe India would beat us out, but they seem to have their own internet that they stick to for the most part.
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The weirdest part of living outside the US is the number of people who still obsess over the US.
Do you honestly find it weird that people all over the world obsess over the one country in the world that constantly sends its enormous military all over the world?
Also the country that collapsed the world economy when some guy in Florida was late on a mortgage payment.
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Is it? Or is it a question of which communities you're looking at? Because mine isn't.
Typical dismissive answer that I see on here. You know very well US political BS has infiltrated most communities by now.
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Yes, you can set that up. But most news communities such as /world, /worldnews, /news, and others are very US-centric. I wonder why that has to be the case when it should be clear to everyone by now that the White House is employing troll tactics.
I don’t know for other countries, but I read French news in French. So the French instance is way smaller than the English speaking ones
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It would already be nice if posts specified they are about the USA instead of just blurping out something about "the civil war" for example instead of "the USA civil war".
One can dream!
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Typical dismissive answer that I see on here. You know very well US political BS has infiltrated most communities by now.
Not in my experience. If you don't want to see politics there is a robust blocking system on Connect (and other apps I'm sure) that you can use.
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The internet as a whole is pretty US centric
There are however exceptions (for example: china)
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Presumably you're browsing english-language Lemmy
Most people are going to want to converse in their native/primary language, and by numbers that means a lot of Americans who are, of course, primarily concerned with American issues
There's also the fact that America is a huge player on the international stage, so American issues can have a lot of repercussions in other countries
And if you haven't noticed, America has kind of a lot of shit going on and there is a lot to talk about there.
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I made my account so I could block all the "news" /politics , which are mostly US news/politics XD. There is no community for my country here as far as I know, and if there is, and it's anything like it's counterpart on reddit, then also no thanks.
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People are drawn to trainwrecks. The weirdest part of living outside the US is the number of people who still obsess over the US.
Canadian, here. Kind of hard to ignore our giant idiot neighbour to the south.
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The United States is a giant nation in the English language. It comprises of a majority of English as a first language speakers and a large percentage of English speakers overall. American media output is also going to be primarily in English, including local news.
In contrast, a nation like Germany is likely going to speak in German when possible. This likely includes media like news. So, when it comes to news articles, I don't expect English news from Germany to be written in anywhere near the quantity of English news written about California.
I feel like it would be like asking why Portuguese media focuses on Brazil.
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*any of the 10,000 or so regional dialects of india
They know what I am saying, they just want to pull that whole smug PC thing.
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The internet as a whole is pretty US centric
There are however exceptions (for example: china)
And I'm sure that Mandarin Internet media sites are very Sinocentric.
