The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians, which is partially true when you look at the sidebar

it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by Canadians. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!

I could understand why non-Canadians would rather join another instance

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago (7 children)

I just checked, it is local indeed

How very interesting... beyond lemmy.cafe then, this is probably how Lemmy implements "local-only" in general, restricting access purely to those who have accounts on that instance. I would have hoped for a more nuanced take than simply seeing an error screen for me who lacks that, but it is what it is.

The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians

Yeah, I get that and thought the same, but otoh at least it is a straightforward and easy-to-understand bias, explicitly stated outright (unlike e.g. "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers"). If we were to follow that logic though, the rather high predominance of the German language over and above the English one, the latter of which in particular often is left out, is also quite off-putting to me. e.g. see this page: https://feddit.org/c/fediverse, which does not have a German explanation first and then an English one, but instead offers purely a German one and then... that's it, it stops there. English-speaking people are not only after-thoughts, but often not thought of at all. Which to be clear is fine btw - it's their server and they can do as they please with it - but I would not want to use it as the front face for all for all of Lemmy, for that reason, especially if that is a kind of signal that they are sending that similarly to lemmy.ca others are "welcomed" but they aren't the primary focus. And then the default sort being set to Local rather than All just compounds the issue all the more - other instances are again an after-thought, rather than the primary focus.

In contrast, "Canadian" is at least North American, but more importantly so long as it is using English rather than French, lemmy.ca is not as off-putting as feddit.org is, imho. Also, after the elections, A LOT of more liberal/less conservative (including "centrist") minded people I bet are going to be okay with a Canadian social media rather than a "murica" one.

Especially when the choices are so limited.

lemmy.sdf.org has only a single admin
beehaw.org has very restrictive moderation practices, and they do not want a wider audience increasing their workload further
Lemmy.today does not defederate from... anything it would seem (and I confirmed that I can access ChapoTrapHouse from it, so it is not merely missing a Blocked tab in its instances list, it's real)
startrek.website is themed and consistently has many federation issues, probably stemming from hardware ones (its uptime is not ideal)
ttrpg.network similarly and significantly worse reported uptime
discuss.online is quite nice actually, and I still use it as my primary "Lemmy" instance, though it only has 2 admins, who were balancing running it and trying to develop Sublinks, though it does not defederate from hexbear and that's a dealbreaker right there (imho), much less lemmy.ml
and then everything else after that, sorted by MAU and restricting country=United States on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, is at least half as small as lemmy.cafe

I think we should keep Discuss.Online in the back of our heads moving forwards - although otoh it might become an unstable/experimental instance if it were to suddenly shift over to use Sublinks ahead of any other Lemmy instance. Otherwise, the only advantage of e.g. lemmy.ca or feddit.org is that they both defederate from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, which lemm.ee has a firm resistance to ever doing.

It looks like you have an account at lemmy.ca - did you like it? It seems to offer roughly the same uptime as feddit.org.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Discuss.Online

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.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago

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:-(.

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