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[OC] My feeling as European reading news on Lemmy/Reddit
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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I love how most of the Lemmy instances are hosted on European servers, yet Europeans still don't have enough population, money, or influence to change the status quo.
US politics does not belong in World News, yet the upvote counts say otherwise. Europeans need to step up the game and encourage more other Europeans to join Kbin/Lemmy. This will never be fixed without the numbers.
English is the issue. There are only about 80M people who speak English as a first language in Europe, out of 0.8 billion or so. Yeah, plenty of people who are relatively fluent in English participate in English social media, but many also spend a lot of time in social media in their own language, something English-speakers never see.
The Fediverse has a pretty big German-speaking population, but not as much French, Italian, Spanish, etc. I don't know where they are -- probably Facebook / Instagram.
Google tells me there's like 332 million people in the US and like 750 million in Europe. I get that they're different countries, but different states here might as well be.
Are there posts Europeans make that I'm just not seeing (beyond complaints like this one), or is there something else that keeps them from posting and upvoting the content they apparently want to see in places like world news?
Europeans tend to prefer discussing local matters in their own language
Possible I missed something, but nothing I see in the world news rules about posting in languages that aren't English. My (admittedly small) point is that nothing prevents Europeans dominating these spaces apart apparent apathy and disinterest.
Isn't it pretty obvious? If literally any European posted news in their native language, outside of the Brits and the Irish, it would be literally incomprehensible to 80-90% of the continent.
Not to mention ^(proceeds^ ^to^ ^mention)^ the problem that we don't care about each other's internal politics and don't know enough about their context to follow them. People might follow the EU topics and the large-scale shitfests such as Brexit, French protests and of course the Russo-Ukrainian war. But that's it.
E.g. I just realised that my country borders six other countries and I can't name the current PM/president of two of them. (for somewhat excusable reasons, but regardless of that it's not a good look)
As someone who lived in Europe for a bit, it seems like one reason for that is that, no matter who wins, the swings are smaller. No matter who wins in the elections, there don't tend to be dramatic policy shifts. European politics often have multiple parties, with some parties containing complete nutters, but because those nutters are not in the main parties, the main parties are more similar.
In addition the US is the only remaining superpower, so US politics has a big impact on every European country, probably not as much as all their neighbors combined, but maybe more than any one of those neighbors on their own.
At the risk of digging myself an ever deeper hole, then…why complain? I wouldn’t ask, but I see this complaint like every few weeks or so. If it literally can’t be a thing because of how Europe is, why blame America?
We do enough like real stupid shit people can be mad at us about. This one doesn’t seem like it’s on us.
Good question, though this was my first comment in the chain, I personally wasn't complaining (yet).
To be honest, I've just checked the "Top Day" sorting of /c/world@lemmy.world, and the news are all about non-USA topics. So in hindsight I guess OP was just doing the usual "lol self-centred Americans" dunking. It is a fact that American news have pushed out the other countries' news from the default news sub on reddit and here (or more likely the system was just replicated on Lemmy by default during the migration), so it's a sort of folklore reaction... :D
I'm probably just approaching this wrong overall. I think it'd be interesting to see more non-US posts in places like world news, and it's not that hard for me to run non-English posts through a translator to get the gist of them.
This is probably a terrible place to express it, and I'm probably being obtuse, but I want to see that in addition to posts like this complaint. I would read that. I would upvote that.
I dunno. As a Euro, I think World news (on Lemmy) is more or less fine as it is. The most important events in the world will be covered in English, and the texts will be formed in an appropriate way - as I've said previously it can be difficult to grasp the specific national context for many events, and a good news article will compensate. E. g. if a country has chosen a new president, a foreigner first has to learn if the country has a presidential or parliamentary system, or the info won't be understood properly.
I guess one could pick out the articles in their native language with more context, or add some context themselves?
And now go on !news@lemmy.world, there's no indication that it's US news only, yet it's almost all US news.
OP's gif literally talks about 'world news', that's why I focused on that sub. The division between 'news' (=American news) and 'world news' (=non-American) has been established on reddit probably like a decade ago because American news indeed used to overwhelm the rest; today there's not much of a point to complain or act surprised about this "system", considering that almost everyone is used to it.
Different states are not like literally different countries.
Exactly, different states still have their country as common ground. Most Europeans identify with their nationality first, and as a European second.
If I remember correctly, most Europeans identifiy first with their city, then with their country and third with the EU..
When asked where I'm from I say my state, I don't say I'm American.
Yeah I don't know any Americans that don't do this. Like I get it, I don't like us either, but going from Colorado to Texas is more jarring to me than going from France to Germany.
Yes, going from "foreign place where I don't speak the language" to "foreign place where I don't speak the language" isn't jarring because it's all very foreign. But, the differences between France and Germany are objectively huge compared to the differences between Colorado and Texas.
..I do speak the language in one of the two, but thanks for the shitty assumption. That it's more jarring for me between two states is my own subjective opinion. It's almost like there's more to culture than language.
Do you think every region in European countries is the same? There is more of a difference between Bavaria and the rest of Germany than most US states.
This is ridiculous. This is why Europeans think we're so stupid and insular, and they're right.
People in North America identified with their colony/state first, and the United States second back in the 1700s. Give it time...
That's not even remotely comparable to the situation in Europe.
The European Union is a confederation, just like the United States under the Articles of Confederation was.
Different states in the early 1800s might be like different European countries are today. But, today, states have a lot less power, and people generally think of themselves as American first.
In addition, European countries speak different languages. That severely limits the common ground you share with neighbouring countries.
They also have different cultures, traditions, history, etc.
Yeah, European countries have histories going back a thousand years or more. While there's going to be some shared history in border regions (often they swapped back and forth between countries depending on who was strong and who was weak), there's a lot of differences between them that are pretty deep seated.
If those countries shared a common language the cultures would tend to blend over time. When they speak different languages that process is a lot slower.
IMO the differences between major US cities are smaller than the differences between any given city and the rural areas surrounding that city.
Even then, different states in the early 1800s had more or less the same history/origins (colonists that arrived relatively recently)
^ This guy Articles of Confederation.
(Seriously, the European Union basically has the same kind of structure now as the United States did between 1776 and 1789.)