What’s going on on the non-English parts of the internet?

Question

I'm mainly addressing this question to the non-native english-speaking users of HN.Stumbling upon PPT earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System) -- the largest telnet-based BBS in Taiwan (~500k messages per day),I wanted to ask: What&rsquo;s going on on the non-english parts of the internet that english-speaking people are all missing out on?How are the forums, blogs and communities in your language? How is the culture different/simmilar compared to the international (read 'english-speaking') communities? Is the traffic contained to the top international sites, like Facebook? Or is it spread across multiple local sites? Do you think it is to your advantage to be able to experience the internet in two languages? Do you think it is detrimental to americans, for instance, to only experience the internet in english?

franciscop · Accepted Answer

In Spain there are alternative sites to some of the bigger more social ones. A big one ~10 years back was Tuenti, which copied and then died because of Facebook. But there are sites that are still alive and thrilling:
Newspapers: all over the place, but specially big are https://www.marca.com/ and https://as.com/
There are of course a bunch of local startups, like Glovo, Lola Market, etc.
https://www.meneame.net/ - A Reddit alternative
https://www.forocoches.com/ - Somewhere between Reddit and 4chan
For almost everything else we use the US companies: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc.
For Engineering, there's a bunch of Slack groups in different cities where you can talk (like a distributed Hacker News).