Fediverse

As a US-based person, just no. It is not desirable to host anything here or to trust any US-based service for a number of reasons.

If we look at how toxic and racist the local city groups are on Reddit or Facebook, I'm not sure this is a good model. If I'm a black trans woman living in a small town in Mississippi, my local instance might not even be a safe place, for me.

Similarly, I would encourage blind folks to join us at rblind.com rather than a local instance, because a local instance might not take our needs into account: many have captchas, some use inaccessible themes, etc. At rblind.com you can be sure that we won't deploy an update or configuration change that will break accessibility, because the server admins and moderators are all blind ourselves. But the beauty of federation means that you can talk to everyone else on other instances, so being part of a particular identity group doesn't limit you to just talking to other members of that group.

This is a shit take. OP doesn't know how the internet works. Join any instance that you like, and subscribe to the community that has a topic based on your geographical region.

There's only one mexican instance, it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad so... Yeah, out of options.

I've been here since the reddit API exodus and I've never seen a latinamerican comm in my feed, much less latinamerican spanish posts.

And hosting an instance is not that simple, it requires effort, content, time, some originality and money (even if a little)... And people who want to join, but I've seen maybe 1 mexican (who I assume lives in México too) other than me... Because mexicans love being strangled by meta, so there's little to no incentive into creating a space for us in the fediverse.

Yes, and no. If you want to run specific community types - it might be better to be on a more 'general' or topical instance rather than a community geographically relevant to your country.

Moreover, some national instances don't have Piefed equivalents yet.

Many (maybe most) non-anglophones are already doing that ...

... depending on your definition of "local". Where are the big anglophone servers located, anyway?

It's frustrating to see the largest instance recommended all the time since it's rather heavy on censorship

There currently aren't many of those.

Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.

Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can't be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.

That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.

But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn't really matter. You're talking about identity, not infrastructure.

Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn't matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "reviving democracy".

The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It's run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.

They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.

The reason Lemmy doesn't have local communities, is not structural. It's size.

There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you'd have maybe one post a year.

It's not clear where most of them are based. I am an American living in Czechia. I don't see any Czech language ones (though I'd be using mostly English anyway), so my assumption is that there aren't any in Czechia, which is likely wrong and just based on lack of info.

If the user likes none of the regional instances he/she knows of, should the user recommend things he/she doesn't like?

Similarly, some instances have more clear-cut niches. If the user finds such an instance to be a good recommendation to someone interested in the fediverse, should he/she avoid it if it's too far physically from the interested user?

Maybe I could see country or even general region, but town?? Why would I want to publicly give away my location like that?