And social media is arguably the main thing. The network effects make it sticky but the US has been amazing at exporting it’s culture, social media amplifies that, and right now that culture is a bit fascisty with a hint of freedom stopping regulation of the rich and misleading. That said, but that lens, I’m not really sure Lemmy is a great alternative since it has a lot of people from the US already and I think it wouldn’t scale well (either because of lack of instances, burn out from moderators, or the problems migrating here)