Thanks, thats really nice to hear!

The dominance of Europe is mostly because there is a very active Dutch community of Lightning Network nodes called Satoshi Radio.

We started our first Ring of Fire with 65 nodes with mainly Dutch speaking node operators, and after doing some smaller rings with that community as well we thought it was better to "Connect the World". We've done over 100 rings of fire from the Satoshi Radio Ring of Fire group now, but there are probably more similar shapes done in other communities like Plebnet and LN+.

Although many people of those communities participate in multiple of these concepts, I was only able to create a point of view from our SR RoF community.

This is because most nodes are behind tor, to see how well we are doing we ask participants to provide their country. Those are collected for the map in a privacy friendly way, so not connected to their public keys. We only know what countries are connected to each other (so two nodes from the same country are not counted for the map).

As you stated yourself, there are also fewer countries on the North American continent. However, the arcs are also thinner which means there are lesser connections in general.

This is of course not intentional, we welcome everyone to join our mission to #connect_the_world. If you want to contribute, we'd love to see you in our Telegram group (linked on the map page).

And it might be because Satoshi Radio started in The Netherlands. We started with a 65 node ring of fire, and later also started doing international rings.