if there were countries in Europe that were as politically idiotic as the US has been for literal decades I’m sure you’d read about that place more than the US.
I live in Canada and as far as political news goes here…it’s dreadfully boring and I imagine it’s the same for most of Europe. It’s always been like that. even regular news here it’s boring. nothing dramatic happens because unlike the US most of the world has their shit together when compared to the US.
I miss the days of boring US politics
Because in a 24 hour news cycle the most interesting story gets the most airtime? Also we likely outnumber you on any engagement. I can’t tell you the last time I saw a story from Canada or Germany or the uk that beats felonious demented white nationalist pedophile attempts to ruin entire world in narcissistic crashout. Even if a euro story is important, There are likely less lemmy users who even have a chance of seeing the story much less understand the context enough to engage. Even chinese people are engaging with America’s shit show on xiaohongshu. It’s a matter of worldwide impact on every platform. Everyone here to watch Nero fiddle
Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Chaos makes the news. Boring doesn’t. Countries that are currently being run by mostly functional adults don’t find themselve in the news as much as countries that are a literal dumpster fire being fed by boat-loads of orange toddler piss.
Ergo…the U.S. news is everywhere at the moment.
Have you seen the shitstorm we’re (U.S.) in? We’re like the worst car crash you’ve ever seen and then the ambulance also crashes then the fire truck blows up and then aliens come down and start attacking…kinda hard to look away.
You forgot the train derailment and plane crash…
I thought I understood US politics…even if it was by osmosis given the sheer volume we’re exposed to…but lately I felt like I only understood the dem half…after the election I’m not sure and by now I have this “there is no hope of understanding this mess, different culture, different values” that I get from trying to understand Indian politics.
I mean honestly this is the most deranged and worst it’s been in my … at least adult lifetime. I think a lot of the political mess we’re in is tied into our appetite for some pretty terrible pop culture. Yes, yes, we have moral and intelligent and sane people here too, but the way that we have leaned in so hard to trashy reality television, infuencers, anything to grab your attention and reward it monetarily…hell we have a reality tv president. It’s not the only reason I think we’re in the mess, but I think we’ve been primed to accept more and more outrageous behavior cause we’ve always been over the top and big and loud. I always assumed I’d live in a democracy, it was just a given. This is the first time I’m doubting it.
Yeah fam we live in a fascist oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. Been that way probably our whole lives, it’s just the latest puppet gave the game away pretty hard. Hope you’ll keep following the white rabbit for your own self edification but stay hydrated and fed and look after your safety, things can get a lot worse before enough people come together to make it better.
As an American I think the same way.
We’ve always really had two parties but historically they were not radically different. While I have certain tendencies, I’ve always understood the other party/perspective and sometimes voted for those candidates.
But now I have no clue what half the country is thinking. I don’t understand what happened to let the current crop of criminals attain leadership or get away with so much. Sometime I think it’s the “leopard eating faces” scenario, but sometimes I think it’s the toddler having a tantrum and knocking over the table scenario. Sometimes I think it’s just narcissists who can only think in the current time with no connection to the future. Sometimes I think people have no abstract thinking anymore and sometimes I think they’re all just gullible and easily manipulable. I can’t even have empathy for them because I can’t tell whether they deserve pity or need a scolding or need to stick to their sandbox.
Or if you’re talking about the mechanics of politics, that too. We have ways we’ve done things traditionally, according to laws back to (and even before) the constitution found our country. Apparently that doesn’t matter anymore
Because the average US citizen doesn’t speak a 2nd language while most of Europeans know English, so the focus shifts towards that
We have Florida Man and Europe doesnt
In pretty sure my instance is based in Germany, or somewhere in Europe at least. That doesn’t really matter. You can belong to an instance hosted anywhere, and also I don’t trust data privacy at all in the US so I’d rather not have my home instance be hosted here.
Presumably somewhere close enough that they don’t want to risk breaking UK law as it’s blocked here. Not sure if any other instances will follow. I think all of lemmy is probably against UK law now. Hope we will always have some instances or its small enough to get ignored.
The US is the largest English-speaking country by far and this post is in English. Switch to another language and you’ll see less US stuff.
That has nothing to do with anything. You will obviously not be aware of it, but by far the greater majority of English speakers you encounter on the internet are not actually from an English speaking country, and definitely not from the US. That is because English functions as the lingua franca of the internet, so we have to use English to be mutually understood.
Is it? Or is it a question of which communities you’re looking at? Because mine isn’t.
Yes, you can set that up. But most news communities such as /world, /worldnews, /news, and others are very US-centric. I wonder why that has to be the case when it should be clear to everyone by now that the White House is employing troll tactics.
Because the USA has so much military and economic power that it is the axis about which the English-speaking world turns. And it is making wildly stupid choices in its foreign and domestic policies, which gets peoples attention from both potential impacts to their own countries and out of sheer horror and exasperation. Finally, it has a huge population relative to any other english speaking nation, and its citizens will tend to vote as a bloc about things they find interesting. And the things they find interesting will typically involve their own nation. Germans, for example, will do this too - but there are far fewer germans than americans, so in an open market, American news gets the most votes from its citizens and ends up on top of the stack.
This is what I wanted to suggest. There’s just a lot of news happening in America right now, and because of America’s position in the western world that news has widespread implications.
Politics in America are also very dramatic, so the stories might drive more engagement from people into that sort of thing.
Greatest show on earth, bby!
Nah, bullshit. Most news networks and media houses have marketing teams to spread their news links and artificially “boost” their links all over the place. Lemmy has these folks who pretend to be normal users but tend to only post news from specific websites or post tangetial links and then add in their own. And, they get to the top fast.
It’s social media marketing 101.
Normal lemmy users who actually got here to escape the vote manipulations or whatever in other networks usually post archived links, summary, or even the whole article in the text. You don’t normally see that with marketing accounts. And I’ve seen that’s grow ever more as the community gets larger.
But continue to think the US is the center of the universe and there’s no manipulation or marketing going on at all. It’s working out so well for it, they made a TV reality star president, TWICE.
But you do you on your axis.
I don’t know for other countries, but I read French news in French. So the French instance is way smaller than the English speaking ones
Would that be J Lai Lu? And how would you make it show more often in your feed and us news show less often? That’s the kind of balance I’d like to get, useful us news about once a day and useful French news about once a day, instead of 10x of same Epstein news and 0 French/whatever
That’s why we moved our french communities there, on jlai.lu. so if you have a jlai.lu account, you can set your timeline to local and then every news will be french.
There is another solution : PieFed. With PieFed account, you can subcribe to the flux i created :
- https://piefed.social/f/cafe_fr (a cosy place where news are removed)
- https://piefed.social/f/actu_fr (there is also canada, swiss and belgium. For the worst news, such us US, gaza…are in Actualités difficiles)
- https://piefed.social/f/peertube_fr (a curratod list of french peertube content)
- https://piefed.social/f/societe_fr (for feminism, 0 waste, less cars, deaf…)
Oh i forgot, on piefed, we have a keyword filter. You can add trump, musk, eipstein and then ask piefed to hide or blur those posts.
I hope it helped ya somehow :)
I appreciate all the info, unfortunately there’s several things that confuse me.
What’s piefed, is this an instance or an app?
What do I do if I want Australia, France and a few other countries, do I need accounts in multiple instances? How do I find them? Can I have all of their posts collated simultaneously in my racoon app?
What’s a flux?
Is there a book “Lemmy for Dummies”? Or perhaps a ted talk course to teach me basics?
PieFed is a software that support flair, tags, multicommu…your instance has opened a PieFed instance there : https://piefed.world/
The account on jlai.lu allow ya to use local shorting so you can switch to french content or english easily as we do.
A flux, is a piefed feature, this is a multicommunity. They can be public (shared to everyone) or private. So you can create flux based on countries, language, whatever come to your mind…on subcribe to an available flux, import existing one to your piefed instance…
Would that be J Lai Lu?
J’lai lu has news but it isn’t the only thing. it is the best I know but there might be something better. I don’t know how to search for communities by language. I actually read newspapers at the library when I want to read French news
And how would you make it show more often in your feed and us news show less often?
I sort by scale for this
Interesting, thank you :)
on lemmy.world these are all us news. not unlike reddit.
pay other inatances a visit and see if you like anything else better.
Have you posted articles and discussions relevant to your country?
Can you parrot anything else?
Typical dismissive answer that I see on here. You know very well US political BS has infiltrated most communities by now.
Not in my experience. If you don’t want to see politics there is a robust blocking system on Connect (and other apps I’m sure) that you can use.
Alright lemme just block every community brb
Keywords, friend. Keywords.
Ok then let me block the whole English dictionary then
This would be less of a problem if Lemmy moderators actually gave a fuck anout the quality of their communities.
Have you posted articles and discussions relevant to your country?
I assume its because people love watching train wrecks.
Can confirm. Season 5 is off to a great start. 🍿
I heard a rumor that half way through season 5 there is going to be a surprise change in cast.
Oooh! Switching things up to keep it spicy. Spoilers! Well, there has been some foreshadowing, but still… I mean, the writing is far from stale or boring, but throwing in a plot twist like that mid-season would be a bold move.
Either way, I’m sure the season finale won’t disappoint.
Everyone slows down to watch the car wreck.
Because people engage with it regardless of wether they live there or not.
The US population is grouped together in one giant pool instead of spread out by state like Europe is grouped by individual country. We focus on national news that affects the large population, and stuff that happens on other states becsuse of the shared identity, while European countries don’t have the same kind of European Union shenanigans that affect all of Europe and mostly post about country level stuff. Communities in languages other than English also tend to be posted in separate communites further separating their discussions from the general purpose communities.
We are also louder, which also contributes, but that is not as big of a deal as the sheer numbers.
plus, you know, inheritors of the British empire - practically an unbroken chain of hegemonic anglophones who refuse to learn another language
While a huge portion of the population chooses not to become fluent in a language, because nearly everything within hundreds of miles of where they live uses the same language by default, we still provide opportunities to learn languages and in some areas people are commonly bilingual.
It can be hard to maintain a language without frequent exposure. I had some classes in Spanish and French, but without a large population that speaks either language in my area I just forgot it over time. Moved tons place where we do have a lot of people who speak Spanish and English, but since I’m not part of their community my exposure is limited to the occasional festival or signage as nobody needs me to impose my attempt to learn their language on them.
It isn’t all about refusal, it is mostly lack of exposure.
I actually has another language, but kinda never used it. The Mandarin part of my brain is sort of “inactive” ever since I immigrated to the US, because I mostly like to watch western content, and Chinese drama is way too censored, cliche, and never explores new concepts Most of the stuff is WW2 drama, or its about the distsnt past like the imperial dynasties, its too much cringy romance stuff, has this weird conservative “men strong, woman weak” trope, no LGBT characters, no plot twists because every plot is follows a predictible pattern. I never once seen an accurate portrayal of child abuse. Its always the kid character being portrayed as a psycopath, and they never portray the parents with any sort of blame. So much Filial Piety propaganda in everyday media.
And ever since I had depression, I feel like none of the people in the Chinese-American community (those who were born in China) could even understand what depression is like. Whereas at least those who grew up under a western culture sort of understands what depression is.
I just don’t find Mandarin to be very useful, so its kinda a repressed memory now.
I mean, what would communicating with mainland Chinese people even look like? Those nationalists are just gonna call me a “汉奸” (han traitor) merely for the fact that I’m living in the west. Hearing a Chinese language whether it be Cantonese or Mandarin give me PTSD because of how toxic the community is.
I mean, I’m cis, but imagine if I came out as trans or gay (I’m not, I’m saying hypothetically if I were), my parents would tell me to go to the 18th level of hell and my entire extended family would look at me in a weird way. I’m struggling with depression and everyone just assumes I’m being lazy. No fuck off, I don’t need your stupid necklace to “protect me from evil spirits”, I need my meds. I sort of just expect anyone speaking Cantonese or Mandarin to be extremely conservative.
As for other languages, they tried teaching spanish in middle school and highschool but I didn’t retain and memory of most of it. Unless they were taking us on a school trip to Spain or Mexico, its very impractical to learn it. And I do not live in a hispanic nighborhood so its practically impossible to learn. I mean, I couldn’t think of a scenario where I ever needed to speak another language. And I already understand enough Cantonese to understand my parents gossipping with other people, I don’t really want to have a conversation with them anyways, so no need to expand my vocabulary.
Yeah, the geography certainly plays a role - much like it does for Britain having ~30 miles of ocean between it and the rest of Europe.
But the broad trend in the States has been a narrowing of languages. Like, a century ago there was national distribution for newspapers printed in German. Those started disappearing during WW1 and were completely gone by the end of WW2. And, of course, that is dwarfed by the number of First Nations languages that have been driven to the edge extinction, if not outright extinguished already.
I think if Lemmy wants to have less of a US bent to topics and perspectives, then they’ll have to follow ich_iel’s example and stubbornly commit to a language that isn’t english. The way how the internet collapses geography, conversation trends toward orbiting the densest population of monoglots.
It is a self reinforcing system, and the same reason that English has become so widespread worldwide.
Increased communication across wider areas promote common languages to be more accessible to more people, so in the case of the US this means each time people communicate it is more likely to be in English. Sure, some stupid laws have helped out too but this is a trend that was going to happen in the US for the same reasons English is increasingly used worldwide, but we don’t have a national language that English is being added to to promote being bilingual. Quebec has been fighting the trend though legislation since it was happening there as well.
Even regional dialects of English are being homogenized within the US. It is less likely for people traveling across many states to be unable to understand a regional dialect as was fairly common before cheap long distance communication.
I am actively working on learning spanish as an American, because I want to be able to speak to people when I go to central and south America.
I have far less interest in learning french or german, because Europe is both expensive to get to for me, and expensive to stay in relative to other places I have equal interest in travelling to. And besides that, if I were to travel to Europe, I’ve been told that everyone there already speaks english anyway. And besides that, I’ve been told that even if I try to learn french or german, the locals will just speak to me in English anyway since it is faster for them. Due to this, learning these languages largely becomes an intellectual exercise performed for its own sake. And if I’m going to spend hours doing some sort of intellectual hobby, I could just as easily want to learn to paint or play the guitar or perform statistical analysis on the different varieties of weeds in my back yard.
yeah, broadly speaking, there are two languages spoken on this continent and french is not one of them (désolée Quebec)
Presumably you’re browsing english-language Lemmy
Most people are going to want to converse in their native/primary language, and by numbers that means a lot of Americans who are, of course, primarily concerned with American issues
There’s also the fact that America is a huge player on the international stage, so American issues can have a lot of repercussions in other countries
And if you haven’t noticed, America has kind of a lot of shit going on and there is a lot to talk about there.
Kind of a natural thing to happen, french lemmy (and reddit) is very france focused in much the same way.
Well said!
Removed by mod
“Well said”
“I hope your family gets bombed and you watch your family die”
Are you OK? Please logout and hug a person IRL, it does wonders for mental health.
