Fediverse

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.