My advice: learn to read German
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Always has been, e.g. forums from last century like slashdot.org is US centric since 25+ years even if it's open to the world, like usenet was. Every forum using english language have a majority of users from the US, talking about US "celebrities" and US politics.
Which instances did you try? I want to check if it was the background radiation of USpol inherent to most online communities you're sick of (which there really isn't a solution beyond keeping up with the newest buzzwords to add to your filters for from what I can tell) or the dot-social/kolektiva/twitter-like "my political happenings are too important for a content warning and must be boosted to everyone's eyes 24/7" variety of USpol (which there is a ton of in Lemmy as well but i don't think most people are ready for that debate yet)
The second one can be ameliorated a little by picking a smaller, sillier instance (hint: the weirder the domain, the better) and not following The Same Large Accounts Everyone Does.
In fact, I would advise against Mastodon the software altogether and instead point you towards instances of Akkoma or one of the not-Japanese Misskey forks such as Sharkey, Firefish, or Iceshrimp. The vibes of most instances I've seen seem to be cozier, and the Bubble timeline (called Recommended Timeline by some software) helps with discovering people to follow beyond the said Large Accounts.
You can look at https://joinmastodon.org/servers and then Region and see which servers are interesting for you. Besides that if you follow a lot of persons which use your language and have similar interests your local timeline can be better for you. And you can follow hashtags like for example #gardening #flowers #birds
Apart from this, the Explore option on Mastodon, no matter which servers I've tried very often is full of US content, but there's no need to use the Explore when your local timeline is interesting.
Issue is when I follow people, my timeline reaches the post I read in a previous moment, and then I go to local timeline, the whole server timeline, and then the issue appears, in the same way I subscribe to lemmy communities, i read everything and then go to local or global timelines.
Following hashtags is good, but it doesn't solve that issue when people don't use them. Even filtering words doesn't work well because there are generic terms that can be used generically or in a US-focused topic.