this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Is there any reason why there is no large generalist Lemmy instance managed from the USA? Is this just a coincidence? (feddit.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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

  • feddit.uk
  • jlai.lu
  • feddit.dk
  • szmer.info
  • lemmy.eco.br
  • feddit.cl
  • feddit.it

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

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

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[–] andrew@pythag.net 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

I looked up lemmy.ml out of interest (I realise you aren't classifying it as generalist). Anyway: it says that the server is in France.

Also, if you're able to lookup by IP instead of URL, you can bypass any CloudFlare confusion, and confirm that LW is hosted in Finland.

[–] drake@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Cloudflare will proxy DNS requests as well, by the way, so I’m not sure how you would get the IP address if all of their host names are proxied through Cloudflare

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago

Hmmm. I'd imagine that's essential for cloudflare to work. You can get their IP addresses if you have a server that is federated with them and you look in your nginx logs (so that 'if' is a big IF).

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Unrelated question: new instance, is it yours?

[–] andrew@pythag.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah - it's what I use for testing stuff (it's a bit underpowered though: 1 core CPU, 1 GB Ram). I made that comment partly to verify how it would be announced back to me from .world (except I forgot to subscribe first). Anyway, now mastodon.social is aware of me, and is very keen on telling me about accounts that have been deleted (I swear that site has deleted more accounts that could ever have been created).

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

Also

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

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/