comfy

It’s a real phenomenon I’ve only observed online, luckily not in person as usually people who travel here care about learning about the world. It’s not a top 10 tourist spot.

Online examples I’ve seen plenty of:

• Assuming someone is from the same jurisdiction, especially in legal matters, or asking “which state are you in”?
• Going into a non-US national instance and making one-sentence replies about Democrats and Republicans on irrelevant political matters (most countries like their self-identified republicans)
• Going into a non-US national site and assuming a company name is an American company with a similar name (reasonable, but still an example). For example, we have an NBC, and it’s very different.

The “Speak English!” example isn’t defaultism as much as it’s chauvinism. Defaultism seems more like telling them to leave if they don’t speak English.

Agreed. It’s a conversation topic, I fully agree.

What’s the cheapest way to gaslight these data points?

Let’s say one has $10 to spare, what would you buy to ruin their model?

I see many problems with it echoing those of mainstream mass media. Especially with the advent of billionaire-owned social media and the increasing viability of automated posting, we see the same inequality present itself - the richest can pay for bigger microphones and astroturf the place. Even just places like Lemmy and connected tools show what a world of difference it makes to be a little further away from the mass bot armies and the profit motive.

I do believe there are some types of social media which can be constructive, but these are not like the general-audience mass social media we see (facebook/insta/tiktok/youtube/reddit) or even the more direct derivatives, like most of the well-known Lemmy instances. But one must have an idea of why the social media is being made and design it around that purpose. Lemmy is ultimately a reddit alternative. And its most popular communities were/are either bunkers for banned communities or clones of subreddits, hosted on very general instances. There’s no defining vision. It’s an improvement, yes!, but it’s far from what a digital social space can be.