Why is Lemmy only popular in the western World?

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Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨MemmingenFan923@feddit.org⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I see a lot of posts from the EU and North America but not from other continents.

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schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s not even popular in the western world. It’s still a relatively niche and unknown platform that most people in any given country haven’t heard of. For example I know of two communities about my home country (which is in the EU and western world), !austria@feddit.org and !austria@europe.pub and if you look at them you can see that they get very little activity despite a lot of things happening in Austria all the time.

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- 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’m not convinced on this whole “things happening in Austria” malarkey, it sounds very unlikely
  
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  - qprimed@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I know, right! millennia of boring European history. nothing ever happens over there.
    
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  - klu9@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Lots of things happen there! It’s party time all the time!
    
    Image Image
    
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- qprimed@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  …be the change you want to see on lemmy?
  
  post. comment. repeat.
  
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  - schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I already do that sometimes, but would obviously do it more if others were doing so more because then I’d have more things to react to. Chicken and egg problem.
    
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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s mostly an English language forum. But there’s instances that are set up in German, and I wanna say Farsi (don’t hold me to that, I’m going off what someone else said it was). There’s communities that are Spanish and Portuguese based, though I can’t recall if there’s instances in those or not. I’ve seen Cyrillic posts and comments, though I couldn’t tell you anything more than that.

So, it’s not totally western world, just damn near it.

There’s a decided lack of Asian presence in years terms of instances, but there are users that have said they’re from japan, korea, and thailand (iirc).

I’ve yet to run across anyone saying they’re from anywhere in Africa.

South America, I’m not sure if you count as western or not, but there’s definitely some folks from Brazil, and I wanna say Venezuela? But it’s been a few months since I ran into that conversation, could have been something made me think Venezuela when it was somewhere else.

But, tbh, lemmy started out as, and still is, a reddit offshoot. Reddit was not only predominantly western, but predominantly american in user base. Lemmy seems a little more diverse than that, and also seems to be shifting at least more European than reddit ever has been.

I’m pulling all this from memory of seeing people talk about where they’re from, over mostly the last two years, since before the reddit debacle in 23, I maybe used lemmy a handful of times, just to keep track of how it was going.

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- Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Monyet.cc is a Malaysian instance .
  
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  - southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Nice :)
    
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IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There are 1.4 Billion people behind 2 walls, the infamous firewall of censorship, and, most importantly, the language barrier.

My parents are in the US, so the first wall is gone, but they still have the second wall, and they don’t want to leap over that wall and continues to use their walled garden Wechat with their corporate algorithms and privacy intrutions like facebook/instagram.

Lemmy is mostly only advertised in Reddit, so most Lemmy users are former Reddit users. And since Reddit is mostly European / North American, the same trend follows.

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- MemmingenFan923@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Lemmy is mostly only advertised in Reddit, so most Lemmy users are former Reddit users. And since Reddit is mostly European / North American, the same trend follows.
  
  Lemmy needs advertisement outside the Reddit / European&North American bubble.
  
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hitagi@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Reddit was (and still is) seen as foreign/overseas social media. Other social media platforms are much more diverse than Reddit. Twitter, TikTok, and Insta for example. YouTube and Facebook too.

Most people here in Lemmy come from Reddit. Reddit is very popular in the Western world. It’s not popular outside of it.

In the context of the larger Fediverse, I think Misskey is an interesting case study. It’s created and designed by Japanese people. The docs are in Japanese. It’s sponsored by a Japanese company. Resources and support are also in Japanese. Therefore it has a strong Japanese userbase.

On the other hand, Lemmy is created and designed by Western people. The docs are in English. It’s sponsored by a Western company. Resources and support are in English. Therefore it has a strong Western userbase.

Also I should point out that other than Twitter, Instagram, etc. there are some platforms operated by non-Western companies. China has a lot of those like Bilibili, Weibo, Baidu, etc. Korea has Katalk and Line, etc etc. They aren’t popular outside of the region.

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- db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  It’s sponsored by a Western company. Resources and support are in English.
  
  Laughs bitterly in FOSS…
  
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  - hitagi@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I should clarify that NLnet is probably not a commercial company like Skeb is. I know translation exists but all the Lemmy support chatrooms are in English.
    
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Bullybeard@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I am from South East Asia, and as far as I know, the only one here.

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- JayGray91@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  monyet.cc instance is made by Malaysians. Funnily enough it’s hosted in Singapore.
  
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- MemmingenFan923@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  So you are a pioneer. That’s cool.
  
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adrianhooves@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
is mexico the western world?? yea!! i’m a westerner

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Transform2942@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think the main reason is because the vast majority Lemmings are former Redditors so Lemmy is popular where Reddit is popular

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Australians and New Zealanders are here and on a different continent.

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- DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Australia and New Zealand are in the Western World.
  
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  - adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    … just the most SouthEastern part of it :D
    
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  - lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Geograohically they aren’t, but they’re culturally similar, sure.
    
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XiELEd@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m from the Philippines, a country in Southeast Asia.

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- MemmingenFan923@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Hello Phillipines 👋
  
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SolidShake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Lemmy is small. It’s like local shop a few blocks away from a Walmart.

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- lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  See, even your metaphor contains US-only brands.
  
  Also, what’t up with Americans speaking in brands?
  Why can’t it be a local shop a few streets away from the supermarket?
  
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Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I would also like to chime in regarding how the community is quite small, there are two (large-ish) Canadian instances but despite this there isn’t really a large francophone population here from what I’ve seen.

I think the western-anglo bias is in part because the community requires people to host the servers, for the community to even exist in the first place. Smaller regions (such as franco-canada, French speakers only making up ~24% of our population) will make up a smaller portion of the user base and likely found out about the App through other English-language resources.

Mastodon has a bit of a larger more diverse community, but it also has had the benefit of many more years of larger (but still niche) usage and arguably more severe issues with X formerly known as Twitter becoming a hell-hole.

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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That said I have seen Brasillian communities
  
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Temperche@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Asians use Misskey

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PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Social media in general (as we think of it) is much more popular in western nations. Thats not to say those outside the west don’t use social media, but it tends to be much more dominated by group-chats (IE WhatsApp, Telegram) and by more isolated platforms or sections of platforms. Of the social media platforms we’ll be familiar with, it tends to be mostly just the most popular and established ones like Instagram, Facebook, and now Tiktok, rather than something still relatively niche and nerdy like Reddit (nonetheless Lemmy).

All that said, again, this is a massive oversimplification talking broadly about trends. We’re talking about thousands of different cultures in entirely different countries and enviroments.

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- MemmingenFan923@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  tends to be much more dominated by group-chats
  
  Interesting point. Didn’t know about this cultural difference.
  
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  - jbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Group chats and telegram as a quasi social network (you can comment on a feed of news in a public group chat channel) are extremely popular in Eastern Europe too.
    
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- lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I can tell you, most of South East Asia operates on Instagram and Facebook. And Chinese people’s obsession with Weibo (like Mastodon) and Douyin (Chinese TikTok) are also on their whole own level!
  
  Reddit, what Lemmy aims to replace, is very much Western.
  
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  - PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Stuff like Weibo are what I was refering to when I was saying more isolated platforms. A lot of regions have their own smaller social media platforms dominated by one or two cultures. As for Instagram and Facebook, those two are largely world-wide but often (again, massive generalization) less ubiquitous compared to social media in the west.
    
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Ardyssian@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Hello, reporting from Singapore :)

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mez@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
they are mentally healthier

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hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m from an East Asian country. :) Pretty sure I’m almost the only one tho…

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Skabby73@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Welp, if one of the Trump’s cluster fuck of cabinet morons post something incriminating on Lemmy, they might see the popularity that Signal is seeing… Not that would be a good thing for the US necessarily, but just a new fucking joke for the rest of the world. Still cannot believe the level of incopetence.

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