The USA/West-EU countries make up about 12% of the world’s population, yet have about 80% participation on Reddit. Statistics do not differ much for other sites, as I used to have a decent non-anonymous tech blog years ago, where Google and WordPress offered me similar statistics of 70-75% of the visitors being from the Anglosphere.
Is it because the citizens of these countries are drenched in individualist capitalist societal culture, and easier access to fast internet? What else could be the reasons, and cultural cues?
I have felt that it is the core reason for this chaos and toxicity on the internet, where this very kind of immoral self-centered culture became a virtual hegemony over the decades.
It is a thought that strikes my mind often, as someone from India/Asia, and there is almost non existent discussion about this anywhere.
I think the main issue is as cited by others, language. The other is that Facebook et al focus on countries with high GDP per capita. So poor countries aren’t really serviced well by American social media companies because there’s little profit to be made.
Mastodon seemed to be gaining some popularity in India for a time. It could be useful in other countries. Same with Lemmy, in the same way that LibreOffice has a large Global South adoption rate. Lemmy and Mastodon would need to focus on and promote localization though for that plan to succeed.
But we’re talking about why westerners get treated differently than the rest of the world really, and a lot of it has to do with US hegemony.