General Discussion

More than weird, it should be corrected.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think it would be out of bounds for instance admins to force such change as they see fit if it makes enough sense.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another example: !law@lemmy.world

@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.

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.

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

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.