C/politics@lemmy.world being US only is weird

More than weird, it should be corrected.

How quickly we want to become Reddit I guess.
- Well, that community is just as toxic and block-worthy as the reddit sub already. Mission accomplished.
- It's the actions that Reddit took that were the problem, not admins taking action in general. But as long as there are alternatives from federation I don't see an issue with admins doing something about this, whether or not I agree with it.
Are the admins deleting global content or something? If not, wouldn't correcting it just be more people from other countries posting their own political news?
- It's part of the rules:
  Must be articles relevant to US political news. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed.
It should change its name to US Leftist Politics. The mod u/YoBuckStopsHere is responsible for 80 percent of the posts and its comes with their bias. Their mods also delete posts and dont enforce the TOS. If you want to have any educated discussion about politics, thats not the place. Its a very close minded, hostile crowd over there.

Lemmy.world is full of US-specific things. It's quite bizarre that US is probably the only major country that doesn't have its own instance. I've already noted it. And predicted it a month ago, but that didn't go anywhere.

What do you mean. the USA ain't the whole world?
- Every country in the world belongs to America
- World like world, or world like World Series?
Isn't beehaw in the US? Also midwest.social? Or do you mean an instance run by the country itself?
- Beehaw is a locked down walled garden instance that doesn't seem to actually want to be everyone's go to. That's fine, but it doesn't mean it makes sense for most people to join it.
  Midwest.social is only specific to a small region of the US.
- I mean like feddit.de, feddit.it, feddit.ch, feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz, feddit.cl, lemmy.eco.br, szmer.info... So if you want to have a community about a city in the country, or politics, or a sports team/league, that's a better place to place for it than !texas@lemmy.world or !oregon@lemmy.world.
  It also makes it easier for geographic features with the same name in multiple countries.
You could just sign up for Kbin. It already lets you block instances from it's front end. I can't speak to the diversity of something like kbin.social in regards to US vs elsewhere though. Personally, I think a language filter would be nice. For example instances (or even community/magazine level) could have a default language property and you'd be allowed to filter on that. It'd be a shame to block an entire instance just because it's in a different country.
In regards to "US-specific" instances, I think the issue is more that folks in the US see less incentive to shoulder those costs if they can't sell it. The charitable bodies willing to do this or that I'd even trust to do it are few and far between. All of this is just a theory though. I have nothing but my gut feeling to back it up. So take it with a grain of salt.
- Personally, I think a language filter would be nice. For example instances (or even community/magazine level) could have a default language property and you'd be allowed to filter on that.
  Wouldn't help with the US-defaultism-problem though. English is
  a) spoken in Europe as well (I mean... that's where it's from)
  b) lingua franca for all the world
  The fact that most of the world can't really filter English discussions but English native speakers can filter almost everyone else's just by language alone is part of the problem.
- Blocking an instance doesn't help if everything is piled on lemmt.world... Unless I'd want to block this.
  I mean... As it is, lemmy.world is shouldering all the cost, so it can't be impossible.
I am sure the fact they don't use they ccTLD ".us" (not even the government) is part of that mentality. The internet is kind of built to be usanian by default
As someone living in the United States, I personally do not want to be on a US only instance. US is a burning pile of poop right now. Please save us
- You can stay if you learn other worldly dialects. Repeat after me: Cunt. Bloody Yanks. Fa- (ok maybe not that one). Guten Tag.
Because according to Americans, they are The Normal.

It definitely should change its name to US Politics.

Is it US politics simply because there are far, far more Americans on there than from any other country (especially English-speaking)... or is it US politics because other threads are blocked and/or deleted?

There's a rather large distinction there.

We love you Canada, but let's be real here, there are almost 10x more Americans than there are Canadians, so naturally there are going to be more political stories posted about the country with the much larger population. If non-US posts are deleted, on the other hand, then that's messed up.

The latter. Rule 2 of the community is "Must be articles relevant to US political news."
- Interesting. OK, so that clears things up.
It's most likely because r/politics on Reddit was that way, and people tend to make subreddit clones on Lemmy.
- Right, which I think is the root problem. Not all the subreddit names were great - I would have liked to have seen us try to do better - but I think many were just trying to make the correlation between communities and subreddits as obvious as possible.
IIRC, over half of Reddit's traffic was US-based. I'd be interested to see if the same is true for lemmy.world.
- I think it was about 47% but it was a relative majority, or a plurality as Americans call it.
- It was less than half.
I'm sure they would delete non-US political news if it is part of their rules.
Rule 2 of the magazine is submissions have to be about US politics.
- You get outta here with your "reading the rules" stuff.
  lol

Politics was my first blocked community on Lemmy. Then every other US politics community that has sprung up. They’re either echo chambers or flame wars and it’s irritating to use the internet as an escapism and run into arguments daily.

and run into arguments daily.
The same arguments daily! Even as a politically active American it's utterly boring and unnecessary. Yes, we get it, you hate $PoliticalTribe and feel that you need to show everyone how awful they are. Yes, fine, they are truly terrible. Now lets talk about something else for a minute.

US people are way too blind to the existence of the outside world. I'm sure they have no idea that Lemmy.World is not in the US. I'm not really sure what could be done about this other than making a new more broad politics community. I'd prefer the generic named community to be the one that is the most broad and then if you wanted only US politics to make a more specific community such as !USPolitics@lemmy.world.

We all have preferences, but unless you convince the admins to be onboard for moderating communities so that they all follow a specific rule and can't be localized unless it's part of the name, I'd say let it go. I am not comfortable with the idea of allowing majority rules to simply take over a community simply because they think they have better use for the name.
- That’s how you end up with another Reddit situation
Or you know, !worldpolitics could be a thing and you could stop telling other people how to think and behave.
- I'm not telling people how to think and behave. That is a weird thing to say in my opinion. I'm sharing my thoughts and feeling. I don't mind if people disagree or have counter points to make. That is the nature of discussion.
Unless non-American politics is being deleted then it is just who the more prolific posters are.
- US politics only is in the community rules.
- Look at the rules. It IS being deleted in c/politics

I agree. on any other server it would already be questionable, but lemmy.world suggests international appeal. The default news should be world news, with each country heading their own channel.

I'll speak to the moderators, if we should unlock it for international politics, but right now it's US moderators and I barely know italy politics or EU politics but am Interested in adding them.

Then they should get more europeans, why should there only be mods from the US lol.
- That's so reductive, it's absurd. It's free labor to moderate these things.
  Who is they? And where do these people magically spring from? If lemmy has a low content issue, surely there would be a low amount of people willing to moderate as well.
- Because Americans were apparently the only people who wanted to work for free
- I wonder if it has to do with r/politics being US only, I really don't know mate.

It is going to take some getting used to, but the honest answer is to run your own instance and host your version on that. Gonna get real weird though.

I suppose it's about moderation. It would be a bad idea to talk about European or south American politics if there's only US moderation. Política is a very touchy matter and needs a very good and diverse moderation team.

No, it's about Americans always thinking they come first. I was told so many times that "rEdDiT Is aN AmErIcAn wEbSiTe"... But now, they can't pull that shit any more.
I say rename the communities.
- In this case they did come first though! They registered the /c/politics community first.
  But really they should change the display name to US Politics.
- I wonder how hard it would be for Lemmy devs to put in an aliasing feature, say so when a user goes to c/politics, it'll automatically switch to c/uspolitics or something like that... That would make this easier.
Which is not an issue at all. Plenty of medium-sized subs have a geographically wide spanning mod team. For a large sub like that it's a non-issue.

Lemmy.world, an instance that aims to be international (hence the name), seems weird to me.

I never got the impression that this instance specifically aimed to be international. It always felt like the aim was to replace Reddit in whatever way that manifests itself. I never got the impression that every community needed to be equally inclusive of content from all countries.

As for !politics@lemmy.world, I think part of the problem is that changing the rule would result in very little change since

So it may be better to just keep the US users isolate where they are and create a new sub that would just be less dominated by those users.

From the Lemmy.world description:
"A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use. The World’s Internet Frontpage Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use."
And the logo is an earth. It does not forbid any community restricted to one specific country (neither should it, it's perfectly normal), but it sure isn't specifically tied to the US. I think a fair comparison would be if c/politics was China content only, that would looks weird too (even more so because of the language but well, surely you get my point).
- I just think you’re reaching to say the “world” branding has anything to do with the philosophy of the website. I think it’s cool branding and synergy with the mastodon instance. Other than that, it is no more worldly than Reddit was.
  With that said, it’s no more weird that c/politics is specific to US politics than r/politics was.

I can see where you're coming from, however...Did you message the mods of /c/politics & ask if they might consider changing their display name to more clearly indicate their US focus? It's not ideal, but the display name is what's shown when searching for communities or seeing posts from them in local/all feeds, so it at least helps in that regard.

At the same time, as other comments point out, there are a number of other politics communities with a broader focus across other instances, so unlike Reddit, we can have a /c/politics in any number of other instances with different rules and without a US focus. In a weird way, it's almost better that the /c/politics here is US focused, as it encourages folks to post & discuss general politics (including the US) in other smaller instances.

Although, ultimately, this would come down to whether the admins would prefer such simply named communities to have a wider focus as their name suggests instead of a narrow focus as is happening here, but I haven't gotten the sense that the admins necessarily want to get that directly involved in community naming & creation tbh.

I think you're missing the last part of the fully qualified name: ".world"
- It's a difference of interpretation imo. Others here understandably read it as meaning or suggesting an international focus, but others still (such as myself) read it as meaning a general focus (which is itself reinforced by the front page's own description).
  Personally I do agree with OP & others here in preferring non-specific communities like politics or law to be open to international politics & law, but I'm not in a position to make that call. Also as noted, I don't think the admins are interested in intervening in communities so long as their moderators aren't abusing their positions nor abandoning their accounts & letting communities go unmoderated.

Another example: !law@lemmy.world

It also directly goes against their rule 3 which is "no discrimination".
No, in a space that's dominated by Americans, and where the base politics forum is US-only, this isn't discrimination. It's carving out a space for everyone else.
You don't get to take over every space your eyes fucking see. You're not Mufasa.
- You don’t get to take over every space your eyes fucking see.
  American politics in a nutshell.
- +1 for Mufasa
I suppose it's also a remnant of the reddit community. I agree it sounds weird, but it was also the result of the limitations of Reddit. I don't think you could easily create a tag for each country, and even then, it wasn't user friendly to filter them based on your preferences. So because of this, and because r/politics was already US only to begin with, it was just the easy solution to get every other news content.
It's not forbidding US related content, it's preventing post about internal US affairs that we don't care about

@hyorvenn the great thing about the fediverse is that you're not limited to lemmy.world

The politics@kbin.social doesn't have that rule. I posted about Zimbabwe politics the other day and they seemed fine with it.

!politics@kbin.social
Yes it's not a space problem, space in the fediverse is near unlimited. It's about following the philosophy of Lemmy.world I guess.

The US have a world series for American football/American rugby which only they compete in. America is... errrm interesting.

Could a rich - say - Saudi not create a club, buy the best players, and then compete as a Saudi team?
Asking for a friend.
- They basically bought the PGA using that tactic.
American football has the Superbowl. The World Series is for baseball, which is very much a global effort. Canada is the only other country that has a team (Toronto Bluejays), but MLB players are recruited from all over the world. Shohei Ohtani is from Japan, Julio Rodriguez, Carlos Santana , and a bunch of other players are from the Dominican Republic, Jose Caballero is from Panama... You get the picture. The MLB World Series is most certainly a series for the best baseball players in the world.
- A bit of a delayed response, but I didn't want to ignore it. I do stand corrected on many of those points. I don't agree with the last sentence, but I appreciate the accuracy and will upvote.
  For something to be a world series, I would hope there would be teams around the world that represents the sport and compete against each other. For example, in football (your soccer), you have a world cup which has countries from around the world competing, and you have competitions like the Europa Champions League (the best clubs in Europe competing). I think one individual from a country doesn't necessarily indicate country participation.

Can we change the sub icon then? Since it's wearing an American flag hat thing?

Maybe the first rule for any topic regarding politics should be to mark your topic/thread with a specific country code right in the title (e.g. US/GB/DE etc.). Maybe even at the beginning of the title of the topic. Obviously that sounds like a hassle to enforce.

In principle I agree, I very much dislike reading headlines about US politicians doing this and that as if I'm supposed to care. It's always some sort of circle jerk for one side or the other.

There is always going to be a large US community in any global politics forum. That is not a problem. And other parts of the world (let's say any country in Europe) are never going to be as vocal about their local politics in comparison. Bringing some sort of self-enforced order to these posts could be nice.

Edit: To clarify, I wasn't commenting because I'm bitter about a community being dominantly US. I do not browse this community. It matters little to me what happens here. The thing I'm mildly annoyed by is headlines like "Republican/Democrat politician #837 does dumb thing #929" showing up on the front page.

I'm aware we could always block a community. Though I would prefer that would be some niche community like e.g "Missouri politics". The reason I stumbled upon this thread in the first place was because it was on the front page.

- So if uspolitics has to be uspolitics why not create your whereverwhinybitchesarefromPolitics too, since you want somewhere to post your politics shit? Not sure why you need a broad namespace for your stuff
Well I'm not really the kind of person to follow these communities anyway. What I pointed out wasn't a community with a majority of US members (that is no problem whatsoever), it's that the rules strictly enforces US content. From what I understand from the moderator's own post, it's a moderation issue (which sounds okay to me). I was just highlighting the inconsistency between the choice of the community name VS what Lemmy.world tries to encourage. But it's not the end of the world.
- That's fair enough and I agree. And like you said, it's not the end of the world.

I mean, we did a whole song about it like 30 or 40 years ago, “We are the world…”.

It's not that every community on lemmy.world needs to be international. There are no rules that suggest that. It's first come, first serve unless you can convince the admins or mods of the community otherwise. I also do not think majority rules should apply here aside from a petition type approach where you can just show the mods there's a strong feeling. I don't think forcing anything is the approach. So unless you already talked to them and they said no and this is simply a petition approach as a second go, I don't know what you really want to happen aside from venting (which is also legitimate). But considering you're suggesting that things should change, I'm wary of the way in which you think these changes should be allowed to be affected.

I don't want to launch a petition to be honest, I just wanted to see what the other members of the instance thought about it (mainly because I wondered if Lemmy.world was in fact mostly composed of US members). I agree that a community should not be renamed/removed if it does not break any rule or do anything that deserve such a treatment.
As I said in other posts, not all communities on Lemmy.world must be international, that would not make any sense. But I would not create a c/photography community and ban any non french content for example. If a community is specific to one country, it's a reasonable approach to say it in the name if any member of the instance has not more chance to belong to this country than another.
- You're absolutely correct it's a reasonable approach. I don't disagree. I honestly would prefer that as well. But I don't get confused when I see something outside of that. If they're used to talking politics in person, they may not normally call it US politics. Or maybe they simply weren't thinking at the time. Or maybe they just thought it'd be more popular and didn't think of the downsides.
  There's plenty of entirely legitimate reasons why the name could be what it is. I don't think it's weird. Again, I'd prefer otherwise, as based on name along id assume one thing, but upon visiting and seeing another, it wouldn't cause me to stumble. Like, I feel like this post would have made more sense just commenting how many US Americans are weird like that and just default. I blame exceptionalism myself, but that's just my gut.
  And to be fair, it's not like naming a community "photography" and expecting only US photography. It'd be more like calling it "healthcare" or "government" or something that is commonly talked about without the "US" designator within this country.

There's a Canadian Politics community on Lemmy.World too. It's very small but that can change!

https://lemmy.world/c/canadapolitics

To be honest, there is !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca and it makes more sense to have it on their instance

I just had the idea of making the same post. It's misleading

Same issue on a few other c's - maybe we need to add "_nonUS" or "_US" to lemmy/c names, or wait until Lemmy adds something like flairs.

🦅 🦅 🦅 🦅 🦅 🦅 🦅

You could always sub to https://lemmy.world/c/news@kbin.social - kbin news magazine that has worldwide coverage

There's stuff that crosses boundaries though, especially when it comes to US news.

For example:

A US soldier crossed the border into North Korea and is now being held captive.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188530348/what-we-know-about-travis-king-the-u-s-soldier-who-crossed-into-north-korea

US news? World news? Both? Neither?

Neither, it is not relevant to anyone outside of the states.
- Well it's immediately relevant to NK, SK. And USA.. pretty global if you ask me. Oh and maybe Russia, China, Japan, Philippines, etc. Need to fill headlines with hot topics anyways.
We include stories for world politics in relation to US Politics such as that one.

I agree. US is not the only country in the world, and should not dictate a community like this. If Americans want to discuss politics they should make a com about that, and let the general /c/politics be international politics.

It annoyed me on reddit as well.

"R/collapse" is just about us collapse, for example

- Many times I've seen things about the end of the us To be treated like the end of the world. Some time legislation that would be considered irrelevant in other countries. Some times things about the collapse of us government. Economical issues that would that implied improvement somewhere else are treated as a collapse matter because it would threat us (or west) hegemony.
  I will check this /c/
Me too.
I'm on kbin and when the world news mod here decided to allow US news, I went and made my own news with ~~blackjack and hookers~~ no US news, @worldwithoutus.
- So you don’t want world news. You’re specifically cutting out a world power from your news.

I thought the instance name was just a name and had no meaning in that way (being international or smth) About posting about other countries ..yeah O agree that is US centric but Lemmy is a niche..way smaller than reddit is (at least in my country) so is already hard to find people from other places and specially writing about things not US related. I don't mind if this community is all about US ..when people from other places start creating their own politics communities I'll just join them.

There is a world politics as well as other regional politics communities on our side bar. We suggest subscribing to one of those if your more interested in those arenas of political discussion.

You can't even join a different instance to avoid to influx of annoying Redditors polluting the quality of content.

Reddit formed bad online habits in people that DONT need to be brought here. I like it here, but I like it because it's NOT REDDIT

I don't understand this "them vs us" mentality. People are people. Outside of just yourself, you can never designate whether someone will generate quality content based solely on where they came from or what they did previously. If you want niche, joining an instance that literally designated itself as general purpose was a bad idea in the first place.

99.99% of the users are in the USA
are they

If Lemmy.World just becomes Reddit 2.0, with shitty mods and annoying niche ~~subreddits~~ communities, I'm going to hate Lemmy just as much.

The good news is that if lemmy.world becomes that, you can go to another lemmy instance that might not be
- the bad news is that lemmy.world is federated with everyone, so its likely i'm going to see the same America-centric content as soon as I change my food to "Subscribed" or "All".
  Is it possible to block an entire instance from your feed? Or would I need to go to one that isnt federated with lemmy.world instead?
what is "annoying niche subreddits communities". are people not allowed to fill niches?
- "Shit I Said on Reddit", "Speed of Lobsters" and "ComedyNecrophelia" are so singular to Reddit that it makes no sense to bring them here

They could change it so it's only news about world superpowers. Results would be the same though.

You can start your own comunity cant you?

USA liberal politics, if we are being honest

There is no actual political discussion going on here, just an American liberal propaganda machine

Go back to your safe space, snowflake
- Where would that be?? Lol
Actually liberal in the US is right wing in Europe
- And in the rest of the world.
"corrected" how? non americans need to post non american things if they want non american content. there are more americans there who generate content, be the change you want to see and post about your own countries or other countries then. you cant expect americans to post about other countries to satisfy you when that's not their focus
- Change the community name or change the community rules