Spyke

Every Country That Has Their Own Lemmy Instance

It should be noted that Feddit.org was included to represent Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

I did not include Baraza.africa as that was too encompassing as it covers the whole African continent.

Hopefully this post inspires more countries to join the blue club!

View original on lemmy.ca
lemmy.ca

Hosting your own instance starts off with paying out of pocket then once you set up donations from the community those dollars would fund most of the operating costs. However as the instance gets larger the economies of scale improve and eventually you may have some money leftover to put aside. You could also sell merch of the logos like stickers to help with keeping the lights on.

A lemmy instance needs a domain name, a host and a smtp email for notifications.

I wonder what the Lemmy.world server operations are like.

21
someacntreply
sh.itjust.works

Huh, that exists? I thought no one in SK would care enough to host a lemmy instance.

4
sudneoreply
lemm.ee

I am actually surprised they got that on the first place. That's a very major domain name to have...

24
catloafreply
lemm.ee

It looks like the major city names (and maybe others) are registered by the government and allow people to register subdomains.

24

Thanks. Very interesting, I would think that is a nightmare for phishing and similar threats, but maybe they have good monitoring or oversight.

7
0d.gs

As a Belgian running an instance:

Am I a joke to you?

I'm kidding ofcourse, and I'm not really representing my country, except for an aptly named community.

43
lemmy.ca

Looks like we’re going to use your instance as a neutral meeting place for all the EU instance admins.

44
kernellereply
0d.gs

A long held tradition by my countrymen! Rejoice!

18
kernellereply
0d.gs

Preposterous, I will discuss this with my 18 political parties and come back to you within 200 days.

19

The north and south will make contradictory statements about it and the federal decision will be somewhere in between

3
TheOtherGreply
feddit.nl

Same, I've had to surf along with The Neighbours to find something close by and stable...

2

Lemmy.world is also hosted in the Netherlands IIRC, I'm just proxying through the UK.

2

Are we talking "nations that have an official Lemmy instance" or "nations in which some private citizen or resident just happens to host a Lemmy instance?"

40
fedit.pl

Strange that Spain and Norway don't have its own instance. Big countries

39
MrMakabarreply
slrpnk.net

Norway only has a population of 5.5million. The area is relativly big though.

20
joveicereply
lemm.ee

Not sure if I missed a joke or not. But no, Norway is far from crowded.

3
maptoreply
feddit.bg

Actually in Spain there are a Catalan and a Basque instances. Go represent this on your map :)

13
lemmy.ca

Norway easily has the money to spare for an Lemmy instance. Where's our feddit.no!

11

Jeg tror ikke det er nok av oss her, men... faen... BÅDE svenskene og danskene, men ikke oss?? Flaut.

**Translation: ** I don't think there's enough of us here, but... fuck... BOTH the Swedes and Danes, but not us?? Embarrassing.

13

don't let the norwegians hear you say that. it's brunost.

1
Gethreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Spain had smaller presence on Reddit as well. They tend to keep to other spanish speaking forums, often shared with Latin America.

Basically because there are so many Spanish speakers in the world, spaniards don't even bother to learn English or interact with the broader internet.

9
Dragonreply
lemmy.ml

What websites do you notice a lot of Spanish people using?

2
lemmy.world

I'm surprised Lemmy apparently has had hardly any penetration into the Spanish-speaking world yet. Is there some other Reddit-like service that's popular with those folks?

Also a long those lines, I wonder what services the Indians and Chinese are using?

30

Chinese gotta use state-approved and controlled mainstream apps and media, or access foreign stuff via VPN. Homegrown, off the grid stuff like Lemmy only gets by as long as it’s obscure.

If it’s big enough and ornery (includes political content, rather than say just all cooking recipes and form) it’s liable to be blocked.

19

It took us forever to adopt Reddit. I'm guessing it'll take us just as long to move to FOSS. On the bright side, Lemmy is gathering some attention.

Here's one instance for Mexico https://mujico.org/ and I think there was one for one other SA country.

9

There was a spanish Lemmy instance eslemmy.es or something similar, but apparently it's been down for months

5
db0
lemmy.dbzer0.com

I'm based in Luxembourg, and so is Haidra. Therefore I think we have that covered, even if we're not specifically country-based.

29
lemmy.world

This seems to be missing Mali, the home of .ml. It's in West Africa and since the French soldiers left it's been an authoritarian client state of Russia. Very appropriate.

29
gigachadreply
sh.itjust.works

Well I guess this is only the domain and their server us hosted elsewhere. But good point.

10

True, but it still gives the Malian government an ultimate authority over the domain, which just seems completely dumb to me. The also-semi-failed Libya has ultimate authority over ly domains (like bit.ly) and has actually used its power to shut down domains for being against Libyan law. Domain hacks are not just ugly, they're dumb.

7
lemmy.world

Mentioning the French troops was a bit offtopic. But my point stands. Mali is a semi-failed state that seems to have exchanged one set of foreign lords for another, much worse, set.

5

Don't bother, he's a pro-china anti-western shill, his comment history is a mess

1

Firstly, the French troops were invited by Mali's government to help it put down its jihadist insurgents. The Russian ones were invited, in turn, for the same reason, after a media-propaganda campaign by Russia that played on historic animosity dating from the colonial period. A propaganda campaign filled with angry rhetoric and sounding much like your rant.

Meanwhile, Mali is still a semi-failed state with a jihadi problem which was caused by neither France nor Russia. And on top of that it now has brutal boorish Russian mercenaries instead of generally well-behaved French regular soldiers. Mali got a terrible deal and it was their own fault.

You know why I'm not embarrassed to say that? Precisely because I'm not a colonialist. I believe that Mali is not a child, it's an adult. It has agency, it's not a colony of anyone, it's a sovereign country that can make choices for itself. If anyone's views here are colonialist, it's yours.

5
feddit.is

I'm in the process of setting one up for Iceland, feddit.is. Mostly there, just some final touches.

25
feddit.is

I'm in and I love the theme! The little island will be more self-sufficient thanks to you! Lets hop into a hot spring some time!

6
feddit.is

Thanks! Set the Icelandic blue color as the primary color, think it looks pretty nice.

6

Awesome, I can’t wait to see it! It wouldn’t take too much to get the whole island on board.

Make sure it’s far away from a Volcano though.

4
feddit.bg

Can somebody also make join-lemmy.org notice that our instance exists? Can't get it listed, even though we comply with the requirements for a while now.

25

Wow, not sure if you did something or it was there all along... But I used to search for it by language. And the language is not there anymore :D

But seriously, thank you.

10
HSeldon10reply
lemmy.world

Seguimos vivos, pero casi que fuera de la federación jaja, nos votaron por nuestros chistes pasados de lanza. Saludos.

6

Parece que el Destino de Mujico es ser una especie de Bluesky en menor escala y con su propio estilo

1
lemmy.world

I think there's like 12 countries that still claim to be communist. Cuba, China and Russia off the top of my head and there's a handful of island nations that are doing quite well with it

-11
slrpnk.net

russia decidedly does not continue to claim to be communist. putin's parties have all been various forms of anti-comm far right nationalist parties. the idea that russia is still a champion of communism worldwide is some weapons grade tankie copium

42

nope. nobody think China is communist. Not even the Chinese. This shows you don't know shit about it.

2
lemmy.world

Oh man I made the mistake of saying the word Russia and now I must be evil. You're right, they're not technically communist and after double checking yeah they don't claim it anymore either. Last time I really cared about Russia's internals was quite a while ago, and despite few changes to their economic system they definitely used to at least claim to be communist. Or that was my understanding at the time.

The point still stands, a handful of countries claim to be communist. A handful of countries are communist. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you to decide

-5
slrpnk.net

i don't think you're evil. i just think it's fascinating how pervasive "russia is still communist" is as a talking point when it's decidedly not

15
lemmy.world

I remember googling "which countries are still communist" back around 2018ish and Russia being at the top of many lists. It's just another ripple effect from propaganda that hasn't died out yet.

That being said, fighting propaganda is much easier with gentler words instead of name-calling in my experience

0

where did i name call? i was just pointing out that it's some tankie propaganda. i think your post was overall fine. ohhhh, wait did you think i was calling you a tankie? shit, i didn't mean that, i just meant the propaganda was tankist in origin

6
lemmy.world

All communist countries used the communism idea to trick their people into a fascist government.

4

All fascists have always used leftist promises to gain support. That talk has never matched their actions. Some people learn to not trust lying, many don't.

Bad actors don't usually go telling it outright, it needs to be masked with something people need, without delivering.

5

That's true, but it doesn't mean truly communist ideas don't exist. Both the Fediverse and Free Software, as concepts, are pretty darn "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" if you think about it, ya know?

4

Liberals turning the word "fascist" from a specific term that allowed the analysis and identification of specific political phenomena, into just yet another synonym for "the bad guys", has been instrumental in allowing actual fascism to rise again unchecked.

1
cogreply
sopuli.xyz

What's your country? Maybe we can help

6

Jlai.lu is more a francophone than strictly French instance, even if as far as I know most admins are French.

16
reddthat.com

midwest.social is sorta the defacto US-specific instance despite the name pointing to a specific region.

10

My bad, I thought it was American due to the amount of shitty neo-liberalss on the instance. It could as well be

-1
samus12345reply
lemm.ee

Oh, I thought their server was located in a different country. It's a bad idea to have a server in a location that the US government has authority over.

4
SirQuackreply
feddit.nl

Lemmy.world is hosted in the Netherlands, if I'm not mistaken.

15

The server is in Finland, actually. I am in The Netherlands, so is the non-profit foundation owning LW.

7
samus12345reply
lemm.ee

That's what I thought. I don't know if any big ones are hosted in the US.

3
lemmy.sdf.org

¡Siempre hay un chileno!

(Curiosamente no tengo cuenta en la instancia de Chile. Debería arreglar eso.)

13
lemm.ee

Would lemm.ee count for Estonia?

11
feddit.uk

feddit.uk represent! Best inna worl'! Oo are ya, oo are ya? Come an' 'ave a go if you think yer'ardinuff!

And so forth, I'm sure you get the general gist.

10
lemmy.dbzer0.com

No Greece? Also no India, Indonesia and Japan? Damn that's unexpected.

10
Trailreply
lemmy.world

The is a Greek sub, with a few news posts daily, but noone is really commenting yet.

I had left the Greek sub on Reddit a few years back because the mods were assholes, so I don't really miss a Greek sub to be honest.

4
lemm.ee

Which one is the Greek community? Those that I found are dead.

1
lm.korako.me

(This was translated using ChatGPT.)

Thank you for mentioning our server.

In Japan, there is no culture similar to Reddit in the first place, so Lemmy has not been widely accepted, and there are very few users. I tried promoting it before, but it had no effect. Similarly, Mastodon groups are rarely used except for a few cases. Even if you come across Japanese users elsewhere, most of them can speak English and have used Reddit in the past.

Moreover, as is the case for me, most Japanese people do not understand any language other than Japanese—not even English. Because of this, even if they connect with other global servers, they cannot communicate due to language and cultural differences, which I believe has led to this situation.

3

Just a small note: lm.korako.me has effectively stopped accepting new registrations.
Because of that, it was probably left out of the list this time.

I briefly explained the situation in the following post, so if you're interested, please check it out: https://lm.korako.me/post/115527

1
lemm.ee

Is misskey popular there? They are planning on federating channels (groups) which could make them join able on lemmy.

1
lm.korako.me

Misskey is, of course, very popular since it was developed by a Japanese person. I myself run a Misskey server.

Sorry, but I couldn't find any information about plans for Misskey channels to federate with groups. Misskey's developer is not very proactive about federation, so if this is true, that would be great to hear!

2

There is (was?) an Indian one... but run by hindutva (extreme right-wing) nationalists, so I think we can skip that one.

There is also one that is located in Japan, but no idea if it can be described as an instance for Japan.

2
leminal.space

seriously speaking, how much work is to host an instance actually? Besides buying the domain and getting it up and running on some cloud/homelab? The are any security concerns or maintenance that would take a lot of my time? Do I need to put some effort in instance level moderation, or that comes from communities? How many resources/hardware an instance uses per user?

10
Illecorsreply
lemmy.cafe

Setting up is easy, but keeping it up to date is often troublesome. Releases are far and few between and as such, whenever there is one, it includes a lot of changes. That leads to some instances having trouble pretty much every time; I've been on the unlucky side enough times to be wary.

Lemmy.cafe runs on 2 dual vcore 4gb ram VMs on digitalocean - one for db, another for lemmy itself.

Lemmy prides itself in being written in rust, but it leaks memory like a sieve - I've had split up the containers into smaller tasks (there's an official flag you can pass to it), double them up and set memory limits. That way when something gets killed by the kernel it's not really noticable to the end user.

Running a public instance of anything is a security concern, let alone alpha-beta software like lemmy. If you do run it on your homelab at home - at least get the cheapest vm in the cloud to hide your home IPs. You'd probably need to set up a wireguard tunnel to ensure outgoing federation does not reveal the IPs to other instances.

Instance level moderation is up to you. Don't be too dreamy - nobody will join your instance just because you have it running. Other than spammers and voting bots, that is. Moderation tools are just not there, so you'll have to fiddle in the db directly.

Having said all that - if all you want is a personal inatance - go for it! With sign ups disabled it's a much less stressful experience!

12
joseforeply
leminal.space

I want one for my country, and I want to validate that users are in fact people from my country. Once inside, they can do pretty much whatever they want. We aren't going to be a lot of people at the start for sure. What would you recommend me?

3
Illecorsreply
lemmy.cafe

If you're dead set to run lemmy - then just do it! If soam becomes a problem - turn on registration verification. Spam usually comes in waves, so you don't even have to keep that barrier on all the time. Having said that - if you want some sort of nationality verification - application process could enable it.

If you're not set on lemmy - give piefed a shot. That's what I would run if I were setting up from scratch. Same format social media, but, at least from what I'm hearing - better software.

1

I wasn't aware of piefed, looks like it federates with Lemmy just fine. Maybe I grab a generalist fediverse domain for my country and have sub domains for lemmy, piefed, mastodon, and see what resonates more in my country.

3
KubeRootreply
discuss.tchncs.de

I don't know from experience, but I've seen mentions of it taking serious work, including dealing with CP content being uploaded (federated?) to random instances...

6

I'm fairly certain AI tools exist to aid in scanning for child pornography. I haven't looked into it at all though so I dont know its efficacy.

4

If you don't want to spend too much time with moderation, you will have to manually approve registrations, simply to avoid spam. Sure, that increases the workload slightly, as you're gonna have to go through applications let's say once a week, but you don't have to monitor the instance 24/7. I would still recommend checking reports once in a while, just to be on the safe side. But definitely make sure to deploy @[email protected]'s fedi-safety to prevent CSAM from being uploaded on your instance.

5
feddit.uk

If you have the technical know-how it isn't too bad. Equally, moderation and accepting accounts shouldn't be too much hassle. There are other Admins and devs on Matrix who will lend advice if you need it.

What you need to do is to invest a bit of time into planning to make the instance sustainable, especially as you are planning on running an instance for your country.

  • Get at least one more Admin onboard, so there is some redundancy.
  • Accept donations - Open Collective is very good for this as you you can use a fiscal host who will hold the money for you. When you hit a critical mass the donations should cover expenses and scale well as your user numbers grow.
  • Plan contingencies for if you are too busy to oversee the site or you don't want to do it any more, don't just drop off the radar.

I say, go for it and if you need any help then there are a lot of people around who are more than happy to do what they can.

2
joseforeply
leminal.space

This is encouraging, I'll probably go and do it. Thanks for the insight.

2
feddit.uk

Let us know how it goes and drop me a line on Matrix and I'll invite you to relevant groups. There is plenty of help there.

I helped take over the running of feddit.uk after the Admin went AWOL, so the situation is a bit different, but the lessons we learned are largely transferable to your case. So getting it up.ans running should be the easy bit, ensuring it can keep running is where all the planning and hard work comes in.

1
joseforeply
leminal.space

Thanks, I'll start trying to set up pie fed as others suggested here, and see where that leads.

2

I was just going to ask what the Irish instance was. I'd correct that asap as they can get awfully feisty when riled. I've got ¾ Irish ancestry, so it's not racist.

2
lemmy.zip

There used to be Lemmy Indonesia as well. Just like almost all Indonesian fediverse instance, all of them are dead (except Misskey and that new Mastodon instance barren of any user).

8

Lemmy.id For other active fedi instance: fedi.my.id (Mastodon), Misskey.id (mostly tech and ACG culture)

1

Kinda proud for our Turkish fellows keeping that instance running ✌️

8

Would be kinda cool to have some more African and south+east Asian instances. I would happily donate to help get some instances hosted in poorer countries.

8

Looks like I will have to make an updated post with more detail after hearing all the feedback!

8

Thanks for doing that! It'd be helpful to have it in list form too, so we can help point people to instances based on location should they be interested:)

3
feddit.uk

Here are the European ones (partly nicked from @[email protected]'s list on Reddit:

6
feddit.uk

Others that have come up in the discussion here OT elsewhere:

7

https://lemuria.es/ still has a Lemmy instance running, if any Spaniards are enthusatic, they could try emailing the @admin, @contact, etc addresses and see if the owner will transfer it over to you. I'm sure we can rummage up enough help to get it back up and running if you get control.

2
feddit.nu

Is there a instance for Greenland or is it covered by the danish instance?

6
lemmy.ca

It is covered under Denmark as they’re still part of the realm. But they have their constitution written ready for the day of independence.

11

Yeap, I'm aware of the Denmark and Greenland situation but I was curious if Greenland had their own instance

4
lemmy.ca

Greenland’s got their Lemmy instance in the drawer under the constitution. Ready to be unveiled to the world!

2
Uri
infosec.pub

Bangladesh has one busdyverse.one by ml

5
lemm.ee

there it is! good ole instance of the people of Mali. at least i hope so. it would be pretty colonial for westerners to use their country code...

14
poVoqreply
slrpnk.net

There was a Vietnamese instance for a short while, but it seems like they got scared off with how restrictive their governments internet policy is.

8

It's not a bad idea with the push to end sectoon 230 by Chuck Schumer on behalf of the entertainment industry. Copyright trolls would come crawling out of the woodwork and sue the owner. Meta would weaponize it by intentionally posting infringing and other illegal content in order to shut down competition.

3

This is where the machine is hosted? I am thinking about the domain they used might be a different one. Example I would take where it is cheapest to host it.

3

do these lemmy instances also generally get hosted in that country, to keep latencies low for population in those countries? needn't be i guess, but wonder if it is a prevalent pattern

3
sopuli.xyz

I'm more interested in distribution of users and local-focus of communities than country-based instances, nevertheless the map does illustrate that Lemmy has huge gaps - no country instance in all of Africa, hardly any in Asia... What can we do to make it a more global conversation ?

2
lemmy.zip

Fediverse promotion in some part in third world country (including mine) is hard.

Most people just want free and easy access to the web with their existing account

4
sh.itjust.works

Don't a lot of places also have limited data plans, but unlimited data for using Meta and other big tech platforms? That's still a thing right?

5

That's still a thing right?

all the shitty ISP's in most of the African countries make deals with Meta to steal and sell all your data

4

As far as I know, those stuff only available in African countries and India. Not Indonesia.

1