This is another example of US centrism.
This is politics@lemmy.WORLD.
From the name there is no indication that this wouldn’t be about world politics.
Please rename the community or change the subject to world politics and create a community like uspolitics@lemmy.world.
Edit: For all those saying “Well, just post stuff that’s not about the US”:
The issue is that currently the rules forbid exactly that.
Rules
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- Must be articles relevant to US political news.
This is the point that should change. It’s not about how many posts will then be US-specific or not, it’s just about whether you are allowed to post about non-US-stuff.
As an American that came from Reddit I completely agree. I never went to r/politics on Reddit for the same reason. Sixteen posts about some stupid shit Trump did or bullshit about Hunter Biden that I could not give two shits about. “Hunter Biden has porn! How scandalous!” While there is literally fucking riots and wars going on around the world because of political issues.
I see US politics as the biggest reality show ever produced. Nothing is about governing just shitting on the people from the other side.
All articles and discussion are about what the other side is doing wrong (hint: everything).
Kayfabe.
Thanks for the new word. Interesting etymology.
Exactly what I thought.
Thats is politics on the same level as me calling you a stupid poopface. Political in a sense that everything is political but nothing more.
I agree. The name is really US-centrist. Not giving good vibes.
Bitch, other countries use english too. No country should have dibs on general words to represent something that conserns, in this case, only one country.
I have noticed the same thing about US government websites end in .gov I think no government should have that privledge. Other governments use english too. Could US officials take their head out of their asses and use an ending like .usgov
Or .gov.us, like every other country uses their tld, like .gov.uk. Only the US is conceited enough to not use their own tld.
It looks like you do get first dibs on shizzle you invent. The UK is the only country that does not put the name of the country on their postage stamps, because when they started using them there was no other issuer.
Well Americans did develop most of the advances and the first internet is from DARPA. Would seem to make sense that they took the .gov TLD. I doubt they even knew how popular it would become. Can you really be upset about that?
Also please look at this link on the TLD and noticed it was established in 1985 and administered by the US itself.
IRC there’s a museum in Paris which proudly shows all the inventions made by the French. It’s worth a visit, simply because you’ll likely have been taught plenty of them were American inventions. If you’re a Brit, you’ll have been taught many of those same inventions were British.
Jingoism and claiming inventions go hand in hand.
So if you visit a French museum and exhibit on the internet, they’d likey focus on Rémi Després, who was cited by Kahn and Cerf in their paper which IRC proposed the concept of TCP/IP. If you visit a British museum, they’ll spend more time discussing Tim Berners-Lee and the world wide web. A Russian museum might mention Sary Shagan, who helped develop computer networks in the 1950s or they might mention OGAS a 1960s plan for a nationwide computer network.
It’s the same for things like radio, the telephone, mobile telephones or television. Depending on who you ask, the country that invented it changes.
The reality is often more nuanced and complicated.
Great work on following up with examples, very informative.
It is doubtful that any meaningful research can be attested to a single country since globalisation. Every technological marvel you see is the result of international research collaborations from dozens of universities, institutes and corporations around the world. It’s very egocentric to assume that the U.S. is the only or the dominant motor of innovation.
I don’t disagree with you, but it doesn’t negate that the first “Internet” was a US military project which was then taken over by predominately US universities and they created the TLD in 1985 before another country did.
Someone make a USpolitics sub but with politics about the whole world except the US
I like that idea!
Me too, that could be a funny lighthearted response to this.
@Sniatch if you make it (since you’re the one on lemmy.world, and it kind of has to be there) I will try to supply some content.
I come across a lot of non US politics that is too local/random/confusing for me to post elsewhere so I could send it there.
Please don’t kickstart a shitton of memey sub names like reddit. The correct thing to do is change this sub’s rules/name
Only the community owners can change that, unless you want to get the instance owner involved.
Well let’s hope the owner does it then
Agreed.
Apparently this comes up a lot, so I guess they will either do that (unlikely) or ban people posting complaints about it (more likely).
USpolitics for world politics, THEMpolitics for American politics.
Honestly, as an American I agree. If we need to have a rule stating articles must ONLY be about US politics then the community should be called US Politics. It just makes sense. What we have now is like peeling the labels off of the cans in a pantry. You have to open the can to find out if it’s corn or tomato soup. I’d rather just know what’s in the can at a glance instead.
I agree but looking at the community’s avatar and intro I think it is a lost cause.
"Welcome migrating redditors to the new US political news community. "
But it’s not in the url and it’s not in the name.
Again, I agree but the mention of reddit tells me they are just trying to recreate r/politics in the fediverse.
When I first saw m/politics I knew it would be US centric.
The saddest thing I see here is people creating clones of subs, making themselves the mod and the subs lie empty as they don’t want to actually create content just be a mod. They are not creating a community, they are just name squatting.
I doubt it’d even due to cloning. It’s just due to how Americans refer to politics. America is much more insulted from world events, so world politics is less talked about except in how it affects America. News stations, media, television, academia, everything, generally refers to it as “politics”.
Ultimately, that being said, this is a terrible precedent to overthrow a community that has broken no rules. It’s mob mentality and censorship. It is in violation of the fediverse principles. I even agree the naming convention would be better, but I don’t think it should happen unless the admins make a rule.
Ultimately, that being said, this is a terrible precedent to overthrow a community that has broken no rules.
What?
I don’t see any pitchforks being waved in the thread.
Can you point to a comment that even vaguely suggests what you claim?
It’s mob mentality and censorship.
What?
Asking (politely) a sub name to reflect its content is mob mentality and censorship.?
This is not the first post on the topic.
Edit: if you wanted to ask nicely, you ask the mods. Not the literal population. The population can only affect change through one means. The mods can change it through another. Social dynamics are a thing. You reading the word “please” doesn’t make it polite. Especially since you yourself made denigrating comments in this post on the topic already. Don’t act dumb.
Then post comments in threads where they are relevant as that will avoid this sort of confusion.
What? Are you having a stroke? What is this responding to? How is this a logical response?
What are you talking about? No one is saying “Delete this channel”, but rather “Either change the name of the channel to USpolitics or remove the rule that forbids discussing non-US politics in the ‘politics’ channel”.
If you think that asking for the bare minimum fairness that the name “politics” shouldn’t be a default of the US, your problem isn’t that your country is being treated unfairly, but rather that you want your country to be treated with privilege.
You can’t rename a community as far as I’m aware.
So you are asking that.
You’re asking them to either create a new community from scratch or… change the meaning of the community to something they don’t want to do (otherwise that’s what they would have done).
Fairness? Are we four years old? They followed the rules. That’s fair. They got it first. Create a community on another server. It’s the damn fediverse. That’s the entire point. Lemmy.world isn’t literally the world. Stop promoting centralization with this crap.
I hate to blow your mind at this hour of the day, but every country refers to their own politics as just “politics”.
I mean, if you’re on that wavelength you’re gonna freak out when you hear what Italians call Italian food.
I think you’re missing the point. Try harder. And use context. Just think about what this whole post is about.
Petition the admins to create community rules. Otherwise I see no issue. I don’t follow it, but I also don’t think you can steam roll a community that hasn’t broken any rules simply because of your feelings.
Who’s talking about steamrolling? Is asking steamrolling now?
All I did was literally what you say. I petition the mods to please do the change, and a lot of people followed.
Of the ~10k subscribed people, ~2% upvoted this post in the last two hours while ~0.3% downvoted. That’s some significant numbers. Let’s see how it goes over the next day or so.
But none of that is steamrolling. As if anyone of the users here had the power to actually change something…
Considering people have been posting about this issue for much longer than a few days, I’m guessing nothing will happen. You aren’t the first to complain. That’s why I’m salty about it. It’s pointless and annoying. Maybe something will happen simple because people won’t shut up about it. People complain more here than they do on reddit about this stuff, at least relative to other content. Something so insignificant as the name of a community on one single server. I really don’t want to start having to get community names approved by admins or something. I don’t know how else you’d expect to tackle this problem.
As far as I know, there’s no way to migrate a community. You’re asking them to shutdown and start a new one.
All because they got a community name that you think should belong to some other group.
Yes finally good thread. Please don’t just copy and paste reddit communities like this. This is an international community, so if you want to discuss US politics, name it like this at least. We don’t need to copy the dumb stuff from reddit.
All political discussions should be welcome here. Just don’t complain when 75% of the posts still revolve around the US simply out of the sheer size of the country.
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34% of the world’s entire population lives in India or China. India is also the world’s largest democracy. US is tiny by comparison.
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this community’s rules explicitly state all contributions have to be about US politics specifically.
What does the first point have to do with anything? China is (or at least was as of a few months ago) the most populated country in the world… do you see many Chinese language posts on this site? Yeah, me neither. And that’s because Lemmy, just like Reddit, is a predominantly English language site.
India is far more populous than the US but they have a poverty rate over 80%. I don’t think people in poverty are wasting their time roaming the internet on their expensive smartphones. That’s a luxury afforded to far more people in Western countries and no other Western country is even remotely as large as the US that also speaks English.
You’re the one who started taking about the “sheer size of the country” when truth is the USA just punches above its weight, that’s all.
You have a very entitled and factually incorrect view of who has access to the internet.
Last year monthly active users of the internet exceeded 50% of the population for the first time and the vast majority of people use mobile devices to access the internet. There are an estimated 650 million smartphones in India, it’s the second largest mobile phone market in the world. In poorer areas, households share one device.
I think you might be really underestimating India.
what does the first point have to do with anything?
I’m addressing your claim that US-centric bias on an international site is due to “simply out of the sheer size of the country”
That’s obviously not the reason. Here, you actually seem to be agreeing with me, since you give a bunch of other reasons.
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Again, this is not about where the majority of the posts are from. It’s about the rules of this community:
Welcome migrating redditors to the new US political news community. Please read our rules
Must be articles relevant to US political news.
Currently, posting about politics (if it’s not US politics) is against the rules, and that’s the issue.
I think lots of folks have some pretty awful reading comprehension because I literally wrote that ALL posts SHOULD be allowed. That’s because I know what the rules state, thus the second part of my post which stated that people shouldn’t be surprised that even IF they were allowed, the vast majority of posts will still be about the US.
You are the one with reading comprehension problem here. No one expects most of the content to not be about the US. You bringing it up the way you did was pretty extra.
My point was that there is no issue with a majority of the content being from some region. The issue is only with the rule.
That doesn’t really hold. To pick just two examples: Europe is 50-ish states (ca. 750 million people), the Indian subcontinent is almost 2b people.
Internet used to be US-centric, and English is still its lingua franca, but saying that 3/4 of the content here is US-related because of the sheer size of the country doesn’t make that much sense.
The US is the 3rd most populated country in the world and we all speak English. It is also the richest country in the world, by a long shot, which means more Americans are likely to have access to the internet. It is comically ignorant to think that the vast majority of stuff posted wouldn’t revolve around the US. Demographics for Reddit are far easier to find but I would claim traffic here would be similar. So on Reddit roughly 50% of traffic came from the US which was nearly 7X higher than the 2nd highest country (UK). We don’t need rules here which keep other politics out, but US politics will absolutely dominate discussion.
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This is the sanest take.
People get mad about the amount of US news, but forget the US is essentially 52 (or more if we broke up by sheer size, or by populations or cultures) countries.
It’s against this community’s rules to discuss non US politics.
Yeah. This whole post is technically discussing about that rule.
Sorry, I was trying to reply to the person above you who was saying to just post other stuff is the sanest take.
And the rest of the 194 nations of the world? The US is not the biggest nation in the world, and definitely not the only one.
if we’re talking politics in English, it’s arguably the largest, though that depends on how exactly you weigh 2nd language speakers in India
I don’t think it makes that much sense, however you slice it, tbh, see my sibling comment.
What if…
There happens an uprising and people just start using this community for wold politics?Would be cool first lemmy sub drama
Totally agree. Either change it to something like USPolitics@lemmy.world or change the focus to world politics. There is so much more stuff going on around the globe politically, having everything ‘default’ to the US is such a myopic point of view.
But wait what’s going to happen to !anime_titties@lemmy.world then?
Hopefully it will die and something like /geopolitics will take over.
I call it RCS (reddit clone syndrome).
Rather than let this place grow organically and have its own traditions and in jokes a group of people seem determined to make a clone of the place they recently left.
The name swapping was funny, but it was never practical. Many people who should find it or want to find it ended up not. Not only is there a name barrier, there’s also a barrier to them just clicking away or not engaging. World politics should be the more visible one compared to US politics anyway. Many people, especially Americans, would benefit from learning what politics is like in other parts of the world.
Oh dang I forgot about that sub!
Only good things. It’s name will represent what’s posted - quality content
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Isn’t that just the server instance?
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Maybe you just shouldn’t assume what something is without reading the rules? The instance that this community is hosted on is entirely irrelevant to any argument of you understand the concept of the Fediverse.
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If the instance matters so much then perhaps this sub should be for politics local to wherever the server is physically sitting. And for that matter every sub should be the same. If I want to watch Asian porn then I should be expected to go to an instance located in Asia and then when the sub is named “porn” then I better not get my balls bunched up if I find non-Asians. When was the last time you decided to visit or not visit a website because you first had to ascertain where the server resided or what the domain was called?
Yeah, on the lemmy.world server, that is run by a guy from the Netherlands and hosted apparently in Africa. So there should be no USA defaultism for general terms.
Edit your original comment to mention the rules because clearly people don’t realize what they say.
Fair point, will do.
According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, lemmy.world isn’t even hosted in the US, but instead in Africa.
The creator is a Netherlender.
Interesting, I wonder what the rationale is behind that?
Why it’s hosted in Africa? First, it’s just the data reported on fediverse.observer. I am not totally sure it’s correct. But if it is, it’s probably to avoid regulation/legal issues.
I didn’t agree when people tried to insist subreddits with certain names should be obligated to try to be as nuetral an interpretation of their names as possible, but here on lemmy, this concern is even more silly.
On reddit, another /r/politics couldn’t be made, and there was a valid argument that they were preventing anyone else from using the generic name more appropriately, essentially holding it hostage. But, I already didn’t think it was a big enough deal to really matter, many other possible names continued to be available for a more generic subreddit.
Here on lemmy this is a complete non-issue. You can make a /c/politics on any instance you like, and you can start your own instance if you don’t like any available. The only difference would be subscribers and participation, but the subscribers that are here are here for a US politics sub, that’s what it was when they joined, changing it would not be ok with many of them.
If you want a world politics community with subscribers you have to start one and get people to join.
And lemmy.world is just the instance name, it has no indication of theme for the communities it hosts
Well said. This isn’t Reddit. Make or find the community you want and if it’s good people will subscribe. It’s not right to waltz in and demand changes to existing ones to help with the bad taste left from how Reddit went down.
