As an American who just wants things organized clearly, I find it annoying too
I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US
Submitted 1 year ago by dch82@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/aa2b245e-567f-41a6-8944-02fe1c0e164e.webp
Comments
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 year ago
nikaaa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
the default country
StopJoiningWars@discuss.online 1 year ago
Lmao no. God no.
That implies every country started out as the US. Whereas the US is actually one of the youngest countries.
StopJoiningWars@discuss.online 1 year ago
Assumed by Americans which is an important detail.
Mubelotix@jlai.lu 1 year ago
To be honest I find myself assuming this frequently. And I’m rarely incorrect
Revan343@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yup, if it’s English-language, it’s probably American unless otherwise noted
buzz86us@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well Al Gore invented the internet so the internet is more a.USA thing 🤣🤣
Mubelotix@jlai.lu 1 year ago
Heavily inspired by the french Minitel but yes
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Heavily inspired by the Sumerian cuneiform but yes
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Minitel launched in 1982, well after work had begun on interconnections between different computer networks, using the predecessor protocols to TCP/IP and what would become the addressing/domain name system. Minitel launched on protocols that were ultimately incompatible with the rest of the Internet, and didn’t have an easy way to actually get joined in.
Minitel was more of an alternative internet than it was the inspiration for the migration of the internet to becoming a HTTP/www-centered network.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
If I was using a website called “Facebloke” that was well known to have been made and ran in the UK, I’d assume everyone on it was British.
f314@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ah, yes! The 3 billion Americans on Facebook!
And why would you make that assumption? The internet has no borders, so it doesn’t really matter where or by whom something is made. Especially if the language is English, which has somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion speakers worldwide.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
The internet has no borders
Except that it actually does. See: China, North Korea, etc.
Tja@programming.dev 1 year ago
I’m ready to discuss maple syrup on HoserLoonieSorryEh
WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Or the Australian version “Matebook”, full with Aussies.
Mate.
merari42@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Howdy y’all bros. My name is Todd Bonzalez and I am from one of the great American places foreigners know from your TV shows.
MBM@lemmings.world 1 year ago
I wonder if a news community with a “no mentioning the US” rule would work. Not out of any hate, just as something arbitrary like “don’t use the letter E”.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There was one on Reddit that had a rule that no more than 50% of a story could be about the US and if the US was one of two parties they preferred the other point of view.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 year ago
This is why:
The US has more allocated IPv4 addresses and more users per allocated IPv4 address than any other country, by wide margins - and IPv6 adoption is not that widespread yet. It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
That would be 3 addresses per US citizen. You more some whales like MS in there, just because your companies can grow dangerously big.
eleitl@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Nope en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_number_of…
Strangely enough English is spoken in countries other than the US and even more use it as a lingua franca.
It is interesting you think IPv6 is not widespread.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Of course English is spoken in other countries, and other countries have high numbers of internet users, but it does not follow that English is a commonly used language for internet users in other countries. Most Chinese are probably speaking Chinese, most Indians are probably speaking Hindi.
The IPv6 graph you linked shows that adoption is still less than 50%, and I’m not clear on their methodology… does “users that access Google” mean users with Google accounts? or individual users that use google.com? or does it include all of their cloud services? do web servers linking content from Google Ads count? does this data represent mostly end users, or also infrastructure connections?
hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
No, they highlight some problems with IP4: Bad distribution of IP4 ranges and bad distribution of those ranges. So the graphs show the US has way too much IP actresses, some under used/unused and some overused. The blog post they are from is pretty clear about this.
These graphs do not give an indication of how many users per country there are. There are in fact statistics on that which expectedly show China and India on top. These however do not take into account that social media use way more popular in the U.S. for now.
The closest stat may be Reddit users by country which seems to indicate that about every 2nd user is from the US. (Not sure if Russian/Chinese bot accounts also count towards these though).
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 year ago
These graphs do not give an indication of how many users per country there are. There are in fact statistics on that which expectedly show China and India on top.
Well sure, but people from those countries are far less likely to be speaking English, which is why I said:
It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
The prevalence of internet use in countries with primary languages other than English has no bearing on this statement.
The point of using the IP address statistics is to show that the vast majority of websites on the Internet were created in the US for the US market, and that is still true today.
On a side note, the distribution of addresses is unbalanced but it isn’t “bad”. It is a consequence of a system growing over time. Communications infrastructure cannot pop into existence everywhere all at once, and realistically not many people outside the US had any interest in the internet in 1983.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 1 year ago
2016 is a little far, isn’t it?
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I hate to say it, but, these things don’t change a lot, or quickly.
IP blocks, or “large groups of IP addresses” are assigned to regional internet registries, or RIRs which then hand them out from there. There’s a couple RIRs. I think five in total? ARIN covers North America, and has, by far, the most IP addresses given out.
There’s also RIPE, in Europe, APNIC, for Asia and the Pacific areas, including China and Australia, AfriNIC, which is basically all of Africa… If that wasn’t obvious. And lacnic, which is South America.
Large IP blocks can, but rarely ever do, get transferred between RIRs.
But wait, it gets more complicated. IP addresses allocated in one region could be used anywhere in the world. The vast majority are not, and it’s important to note that because of global routing, you can’t have a block smaller than 256 addresses allocated in the default free zone (DFZ). The DFZ is the part of the internet that doesn’t have a “default gateway”. All routes are advertised, and by those advertisements are learned by others. The routers in the DFZ only have so much memory, and there was a crisis a while ago when the memory of most of the routers in the DFZ were dangerously close to being full… That was around when ipv6 was first switched on. The routing memory is extremely fast, because it needs to be. Looking up a route in a table with a million+ entries takes time, but that time needs to be so short that latency is effectively mitigated. So that memory is some of the fastest used in tech at times, notwithstanding newer technologies.
I’m off topic. Anyways, my point is, ARIN is big. They have a lot of IPs. However allocation doesn’t and shouldn’t imply usage. A large number of addresses are allocated for US military use that are basically unseen in the internet. There’s a few infamous /8 blocks of around 16.7 million addresses that don’t get advertised and can’t be used by anyone besides the US military. I forget which branch of military owns it. They’ve owned it since the internet started giving out allocations (more or less) and today one of those /8 blocks is worth billions, with a cost of about $50 per IP.
So yeah, the US has a lot of IP allocation, they also have a large amount of unused IP addresses.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 year ago
I would love to see a more recent source if you have one.
Regardless, possession of IP addresses doesn’t change all that much. In the early days a company could buy an entire Class A (1.X.X.X) address space comprising 16million+ addresses for their private use. There are still many companies holding large blocks of addresses, and most of those companies are in the US, and they don’t just give up those addresses.
The point being, there’s significant resistance to redistributing addresses once they’ve been allocated. They don’t change hands terribly often (and keep in mind we’re talking about actual internet addresses, not local network addresses that are being dynamically assigned and NATed across router domains).
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 year ago
its just the loudest voices that seem to drive the world.
Geobloke@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It does make it fun to stir the pot
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I mean the us dwarfs other english speaking countries
uienia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your comment is very typical of that (fallacious) US centrism. People write in English on the internet because that is the universal language. There are far more secondary English speakers on the internet than primary English speakers.
pseudo@jlai.lu 1 year ago
because that is the universal language*grince des dents*
because it is the international language of this days and time.
MBM@lemmings.world 1 year ago
Tons of people speak English as a second language, on the internet
Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Yeah like India
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
135 million english speakers is less than 300 million
ealoe@ani.social 1 year ago
network invented in America look inside Americans
How could this have happened?
Henry@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Don’t be so self-involved. Try visit China for once and you will get sick of the word “China”, it’s literally in everything there :), like communist party’s intelligence service :)
uienia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The thing is we are not talking about visiting countries. We are talking about the World Wide Web.
dch82@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
The “World” wide web not USA wide web
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I completely understand the sentiment.
I also understand the sentiment that the internet is effectively a US invention dating back at least to ARPAnet.
I guess what I’m suggesting is: can’t we all just get along? At least we can now all communicate with each other.
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I also understand the sentiment that the internet is effectively a US invention dating back at least to ARPAnet.
Yeah, but this is a website. Sir Tim Berners-Lee represent!
Plus also, English is an English invention.
But otherwise, you’re good.
uienia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The World Wide Web is not an American invention. Who invented what is completely irrelevant in this context anyway though.
wieson@feddit.org 1 year ago
We are trying to get along. We are already speaking English, which is a massive step in your direction. US commenters and posters don’t even bother to convert to kilometres or something. Or the worst: write about something that happened in AK as if everyone knows postal shortages of the US.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If it makes it any better youre more likely to get an American who can convert Miles into Leagues before they even think about kilometers. We dont really use metric for anything, unless youre military or something.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
The crazy irony is that those from outside the US probably know way more than those in the US, in terms of stories about Alaska.
No hate here. There will be ups and downs.
At the end of the day, I’m happy to communicate with you.
imaqtpie@lemmy.myserv.one 1 year ago
Don’t ever talk about kilometres in here. Are you trying to spark an international incident?
FWIW ich habe Deustch gelernt. Aber ich habe die meistens vergessen 😔
todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I mean, we did invent this cursed network. It’s our job to ruin it.
thesporkeffect@lemmy.world 1 year ago
One day, we will shitpost our way to freedom
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To be fair, the US has the largest number of English-speakers of any country in the world. As a first language, it has five times as many native English speakers as second place (the UK). It also has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world, meaning most of those English-speakers are also Internet users.
The US is a single country that is three-quarters the population of the entire continent of Europe, and nearly all of its inhabitants speak English and use the Internet. So yes, if you pick a random user on an English social media page, odds are very good that person is an American. If you were to guess any random English-speaking Internet user’s nationality, “American” is the best possible guess. But go on a Spanish language forum or a French language forum and nobody will assume you’re American.
Oaksey@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Consequently, Americans generate the majority of English-language Internet content.
False. Yes, it is larger than any other individual English speaking group but accounts for less than a fifth of the total English speakers.
…wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_English-spe…
I wouldn’t have guessed Nigeria is the third largest English speaking group.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This point was plainly addressed. Read carefully before going in guns-blazing.
Do you think Nigerians use the Internet as much as Americans?
uienia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Again, you are completely missing the point of the internet and English usage on it. People are using English as a lingua franca. There are a lot more non-native English speakers on the internet than native English speakers.
So no, odds are not that it is an American you are speaking to, just because that person speaks English. You are literally regurgitating the fallacy that OP is about.
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 1 year ago
lingua franca
I love that lingua franca, a term from both Latin and Greek roots, literally meaning the language of the Franks (French) is English. Plus, also, fuck you Esperanto!
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
We should really be counting English literate people, since nobody here is talking, and literacy is more reading/writing.
Literacy is pretty broad too. It doesn’t imply that it’s your native language, nor if you can speak the language (whether you can do that very well or not).
Literacy is going to be a bonefide requirement for most of the internet, with some exceptions, like text to speech and speech recognition stuff, people with disabilities who may not be able to see properly or at all… Stuff like that.
hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
FYI
According to Wikipedia the percentage of English speakers located in the US is lower that 20%. Does this mean that only 1 in 5 users is from the US?
Population of the US: 334.914.895, Population of Europe: 745.173.774. 334.914.895/745.173.774 = 0,449%
English Speakers in the US: 297.400.000. English Speakers in Europe: 260.000.000. So you have about 37,4M more English speakers in the US than in Europe.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The average American uses only English language forums.
The average European who speaks English will probably spend some portion of their time using whatever their native language is.
The average English speaker in Africa is not as likely to have an Internet connection.
The average English speaker in China is likely to not be able to access English social media sites (great firewall).
Many English-speakers in India post online in a mix of English and Hindi that non-Indians find difficult to comprehend.
You’re correct that the claim that the US is ¾ the population of Europe is erroneous. But it is ¾ the population of the EU. I’ve corrected this.
zerofk@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m sorry but this is nonsense. I’m in a lot of online communities where everyone uses English, despite it being nearly nobody’s first language. It just happens to be the only language that everyone there knows. Language is no indication of nationality, especially online.
And to be honest, in those places the assumption is usually that everyone is European, which I can imagine is just as annoying for the stray American.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think you misunderstand.
What I am saying is that of all Internet users that use English, Americans are by far the largest group due to it being a very large country, (third most populous in the world) with a high Internet penetration (97%), and whose residents almost universally speak English as their main language (78.3%).
bstix@feddit.dk 1 year ago
Americans generate the majority of English-language Internet content.
Doubt.
There are 1.3 billion people who use English on the internet as a first or second language.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not all Internet users generate the same amount of content. In addition to Americans being proud blabbermouths in general, people from wealthy countries generate more content than those from poorer countries. The US is among the wealthiest countries in the world.
Although it is not the most representative, nearly half of all Reddit users are American. American media outlets have immense global reach. You can probably name four or five American media outlets just off the top of your head, even if you’re not American. The USA’s geopolitical power means people are always talking about American politics or what America’s leaders are doing, which draws engagement from Americans like a lamp draws moths. 7 out of the top 10 English-language YouTube channels are American (fully or partially).
It’s pretty much impossible to prove, but I think the claim that Americans generate most of the content on the Internet is likely true or very close to true.
pixelscript@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The more egalitarian principle would be to not assume. I won’t deny that. People from more minority locales have every right to be upset at being marginalized.
But at the same time, whenever I read passive aggressive comments on socials from crown countries or from EAASL people around the world bitching about US defaultism as if people are doing it just to be ignorant dicks, I can only think to myself, “Uhh, hello? What do you think the demographics of this space were? What did you expect?”
Americans are hardly the majority of the world’s English apeakers, but for all the reasons you listed, they tend to remain a massive plurality, if not an outright overwhelming majority, of any mainstream online English language platform. No, that’s not a license to perpetuate US defaultism. But like… read the room, people. Your good fight is far more uphill than you seem to think it is.
Donebrach@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Haha. Like anyone lives outside the US
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Ahh the United States of America. What a fascinating planet.
lovely_reader@lemmy.world 1 year ago
As someone outside the U.S., what is your default persona for anonymous/pseudonymous users until you know more about them? Just curious. Like, if you don’t have any information about them, do you read the words in the voice of a person just like you?
DillyDaily@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t read words in any voice other than the naturally subvocalisation that occurs when I’m reading, which is always in my voice.
Even when I read a quote myself Morgan Freeman, I’m hearing my voice, doing a Morgan freeman impression.
But in terms of who I picture? Nothing, people online are not even corporal beings to me until details are revealed. They are still human and have whole lives offline so that’s not an excuse to be needlessly rude, but I know nothing of them so why would I randomly invent details unless I’m doing so as a “put myself in their shoes” thought experiment.
But then I have a degree of aphantasia so I’m not “picturing” anything, all I have is words anyway, so it’s easy not to add in extra words that change my assumptions about a person.
Decoy321@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I default to everyone sounding like Macho Man Randy Savage.
dragonbringerx@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh yeah!
SPRUNT@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I hear you and am guilty of it myself. I feel like it’s due to the anonymous nature of the internet. I think everyone immediately falls into the category of “peer” before putting a touch more thought into who the actual person (bot/ai) is that wrote the reply. Add that to the fact that most Americans see themselves (as a country) as the king of the world.
Maybe you can try typing with an accent, but I think that’d probably just be seen as a racist American.
credo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is lemmy.world, you would have to join lemmy.{country} for lands beyond the fruited plains and purple mountains majesty.
slickgoat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m from Australia and don’t mind engagement with the (mostly) US content.
Let’s face it, the US election is the most interesting event on the planet anyway.
JoYo@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
i live in DC and we get tagged for everything world politics.
forgive for not caring if fvey countries get lumped into uspol.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Maybe you should try posting more often then ;)
YeetPics@mander.xyz 1 year ago
There are tons of tankie subs where you can masturbate to false expectations of the planet and openly hate people who you’ve never met before, check it out!
yesman@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This meme is essentially Al-Qaeda’s motive for doing 9/11.
occultist8128@infosec.pub 1 year ago
as a person that came from 3rd world country, i relate T_T
RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Aren’t the majority of English speakers from the US?
poo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve heard it called “US Defaultism” where most Americans online seem to assume that everyone they interact with is from their country and all US news is considered significant even when it really isn’t.
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t care where y’all are from as long as you’re not a dumbass dickhead.
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Oh. I’m shit out of luck then.
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well, I also sit in front of a mirror.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Terrible news, guy who just started posting on the Internet