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It's weird that there isn't a US-specific Lemmy instance
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I never understood this argument. Why do you think it's important whether English is your primary language or not?
People in developed countries often speak English pretty much perfectly (and know the difference between their and they're).
If you're going to a web site with a mixed audience, you're gonna use English, and if you're going to a local one, you use your local language. No big deal?
Native English speakers have the advantage of not needing a different language to speak to their locals, but that's all.
If somehow everyone agreed that Esperanto will be the default internet language, you wouldn't expect the majority to be native Esperanto users.
I mean, I think I addressed that in my post. When the discourse is defaulted to English, you end up with users who are either native English speakers and people using English as a lingua franca.
In the Anglosphere, Americans make up the largest single chunk, and they accordingly see no need to "enclave" the way other groups may because being the biggest means their standpoint is effectively the default one.
But that is the thing, this assumption is most likely not correct. The second half of it is (which you didn't mention in your original comment), but the first part is largely untrue.
People who speak English as a second language are able to engage with a platform in which the majority of users speak English. People who only speak English or that and their local language are unable to engage with a platform where the language used is not their own or English.
More people are able to communicate with a shared language than with languages which are not mutually understood.
One other factor contributes: the U.S. has a large population which shares both a language and some culture. While multiple other countries may share languages, the populations which share a similar level of culture are smaller.
Then you have posts on social media being ranked in some way by engagement. One post may be relatable to 100k people, and five other posts are relatable to 20k each. The single post is ranked higher.