Fediverse promotion in some part in third world country (including mine) is hard.

Most people just want free and easy access to the web with their existing account

There used to be Lemmy Indonesia as well. Just like almost all Indonesian fediverse instance, all of them are dead (except Misskey and that new Mastodon instance barren of any user).

If it was soft-fork, than its fine. Almost all previous forks are hard-forking, splitting English community into another one.

A lot of FOSS project from non-English community often having hard time to broaden their community unless English community embrace them first. Helping non-English community also broaden FOSS community diversity and perspective, allowing them to collaborate and do cultural exchange.

Misskey. It’s second most used software in fediverse. Used in misskey.io, which has 10 thousands daily active user (possibly 100K-200K MAU).

Developed since 2014. Originally function as self-hosted microblogging, now turns into unique social media. For example:

• Misskey-flavoured Markdown, example
• social games (only two so far: Reversi and Bubble Game)
• emoji reaction like Discord (they’re the first one to implement it on fediverse)
• Antennas (tracking post with any keyword)
• Pages
• Channels (groups)
• Clips (bookmark with multiple groups, kinda like Facebook bookmarks)
• Achievement
• optional ads banner (just in case the server admin wants to do community ads, usually used for indie games, comics, vtuber, or IRL art event)

Their community is mainly Japanese, they desperately need English contributor and community to help them grow.

Indonesian here.

Indonesian have highest trilingual population in the world, and our country regularly import foreign pop media, like from Japan, China, Turkiye, French, Argentine, and so on.

That name seems cool and we will never have problem with it.

In fact, a lot of FOSS software in Asia almost always use local language or pop culture reference for their project. Whether it’s in Chinese, Persian, Hindi, Javanese, Japanese, and so on.

Its even more important to use various word from various language.

English as default also resulting American culture as the most prominent culture.

Newer generation are more acceptable to outside culture, so this will be work. Not to forget, the rest of non-English society already operate in multi language society and get exposed for various culture.

Years ago, people heavily localized Angliscize a lot of Asian media, but now, people are more accepting foreign naming convention. Just take a look at various FOSS porject in Japanese, Hindi, Persia, or Finnish.

Misskey should have more active users, even more than Pixelfed right now. Almost all Japanese fediverse users are on Misskey instances.

A lot of post in Misskey instance are often followers only. I know several instance that the admin say they have thousands of users but simply not reporting any MAU users for certain reason. Even the one that report them are usually lower than actual MAU due to “offline mode”

Among every server that “do just fine,” there are more instances that are just gone for not having proper funding, especially for non-Western instance where paying for social media in not a common thing. I’m from Indonesian, and almost every Indonesian instance are cease to exist except for Misskey.id.

While Mastodon does not support ads, other fediverse software like Misskey support it. Misskey.io, the second biggest fedi instance after Mastodon.social, runs ads and subscription simutaniously.

Their ads is merely community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc. I think that might be replicatable for Western instance like Mastodon.art or Pixelfed.art.

Yeah, I acknowledge that.

It’s just there’s a concern that any FOSS project that developed by non-English speaker will “force taken” by another “Western” maintainer. If we want fediverse to be truly inclusive, language barrier is something should be taken care for further maintreamization.

Maybe we can learn from English Asia community (usually on Facebook group) that already practicing multi-language community, where each people can speak their own language and still properly moderated and connected.

I wish a lot of Western fediverse community helps Misskey dev in documentation and development.

It’s sad that sometimes they don’t want help Misskey community to globalize, and just soft-fork and even hard-forking the software. Misskey community is desperately need global contributor.

I still don’t get actual “left” and “right” definition by Westerner.

For example, people that support native people to be protected from encrouchment of their forest, as well as unmitigated immigration that will drive out them will considered both “left” and “right” side from Westerner.

Some Westerner also often assume their solution of problem is “the best” while all I can see is further division of society.

Please elaborate.

“Left” or “Right” grouping is Western centric tho.

From my perspective as Indonesian, it’s weird that Westerner lump politics into separate group instead working together for a solution that caters to everyone.

One common problem for fediverse is that most of them are Western-oriented, hard to find people with similar interest and common topics.

Lemmy so far is replicating Reddit, which is tend to one-size-fit-all community. Gaming community? c/gaming is de-facto. Linux community? c/Linux is de-facto. And so on. Sure there are other server, but the one with most active community wins.

I usually use Facebook Groups with hundreds of thousands of people. It’s nice to see groups of really small niche, like “local fried chicken seller,” “temple research South East Asia,” or “Singapore-only comic collector”, etc.

There are plenty groups with similar topic, but entirely different culture. For example general gaming group:

1. Gaming group which predominantly SEA people where mobile gaming is common.
2. Gaming group with mainly Western people where mobile gaming is considered lesser form of gaming.
3. Gaming group with audience where anime-manga-tokusatsu and other Japanese pop culture are mainstream. (Taiwanese, Indonesian, Korean, etc)

Another example, healthy food groups.

1. Healthy food groups with people from area where vegan food is common without labeling (e.g. India, Indonesia, Myanmar, East Timor).
2. Healhy food groups with predominantly Westerner that try to replace all food to vegan food.
3. Healhy food groups that revolves around local food, which its recipe are only suitable for certain region.

All these communities might be same, but the entire vibe are different. One might more welcoming, other are full or rough jokes, some are okay with multilanguge post (not English only community).

Unless fediverse is able to replicate this, I don’t think it will reach full mainstream, especailly for people in Africa, Middle East, or Asia.

Edit: I also want to see Misskey Channel interoperability, as it has the closest vibe so far with Facebook Groups.