this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:

  • ~30 years old or older

  • tech enthusiasts/workers

  • linux users

There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?

Thoughts?

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[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Op too young to realize who made Reddit popular to begin with.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Also why Reddit used to be better

[–] DigiWolf@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

I'm called out, although I'm not quite in my 30s yet.

Also... Reddit started out in the same way, mostly as a forum for programmers and nerds

[–] Freethewhat@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I wasn't a tech nerd I would have given up on signing up for Mastodon and Lemmy. There is a lot of focus on how instances work and it seems a bit overwhelming. I had a lot of internal, 'what if I make the wrong choice', or 'how can I move if I don't like the community' type questions. So being the nerd I am I researched the crap out of it and overwhelmed myself and said fuck it and just chose the popular instances since I know that I can move at a later date.

I personally think this format is favored by a lot of the demographic you mentioned. Most of us, I am generalizing here, grew up being active members in bulletin board systems. Then Reddit came along basically murdered the BB, but there was a good community to interact with. Now Reddit is basically unusable in my opinion because the community doesn't care about the content or the people behind the screen. That brings us here. We learned so much of our trade, laughed a lot, and made real friendships on these types of system and it is a place a lot of us feel comfortable.

[–] BURN@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

100% this

I’m a tech nerd and software engineer and even I struggled to figure out how to signup. Most people I know just want something that works. And those things tend to be centralized because of ease of use. The Fediverse isn’t easy to use, and makes the user make major decisions before even signing up or understanding the tech.

Eventually there should probably be account migration and a somewhat “central” account management instance that most users are on, with the option to migrate their user to other instances.

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

A central account instance rather defeats the point of a federated system.

With federation it's ensured that any single instance is only a small part of the whole, and that if any instance goes down (or worse, goes rogue and becomes a bad actor) then the impact of that is minimised. All users being registered on a single instance is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket.

I do totally understand from the perspective of new users that it's hard to understand what to do or how to do it but that is a problem that could be better addressed with clearer onboarding. e.g "Choose any one of these recommended instances to sign up. It doesn't matter which - you'll be able to see the same content and communities across all of Lemmy no matter which you pick"*

*mostly, but close enough

[–] EliYeet@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

My 15 yo ass

[–] ScaNtuRd@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Good. I don't want to see some teenagers doing some dumb dance or whatever is on normie platforms.

[–] MarigoldPuppyFlavors@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But then how will we know if our drip is bussin'?

[–] nx2@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

fr no tomorrow our drip is mid no cap

[–] righteous_angst@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do people have against dancing? Life is soul sucking enough - let people do their silly little dances without judgement.

[–] ScaNtuRd@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Oh I have nothing against it at all, I just have no interest in watching them lol

[–] mariom@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Oh c'mon, 30s is not older.

[–] fututio_enjoyer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is picking a server/federation too complicated?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Literally the single biggest problem with fediverse adoption, brought up in every discussion about migrating to it. It will never replace centralized sites as long as it remains confusing and complicated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14t9t66/im_so_lost_is_there_an_easy_mode_to_the_fediverse/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LemmyMigration/comments/145epgc/looking_for_a_lemmy_website_try_lemmyworld/

[–] Secret300@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

Well it's new open source tech that can be self hosted by the 30+ tech nerds that have the money and interest in it.

[–] SisuAika@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't want to stereotype anyone, but in my own social experience, younger groups don't give a shit about corporate monopolies or privacy, they just want things to work fast and automatically (ex: TikTok). And those I know in older brackets are still on Facebook and complaining that they don't want to deal with change because their family/business/workflow would be affected.

I happen to be 38, a linux user, and a gamer. And I concur that my age-group has just always seemed to be more open to new technologies for some reason.

[–] MercuryUprising@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think younger people don't give a shit about privacy because they grew up in a post 9/11 surveillance world. Facebook, Instagram and the internet at large became a giant surveillance machine and they've never known another possibility, so it's normalized to them.

[–] lessthanluigi@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago
[–] ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe I'm am outlier but I'm 21 and here.

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

30s software engineer / linux user here.

We are exactly who you want as the "primer" user group. We will collectively make sure the whole thing works before the load really rams up.

[–] SpaceAape@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We're the generation that learned to troubleshoot bc we had to. If we wanted to play that shiny new game or app, we had to actually get it running first.

[–] AVeryCleverName@lemmy.one 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think about this a lot. I'm so grateful I had the experience of messing with the windows registry and other phenomena of the 90s.

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[–] AirZone@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well.. I'm 36 yo physician, an orthopedic surgeon resident. But I do LOVE tech&gaming. I want to switch from reddit because my favorite app boost stopped working and the creator is developing a boost app for lemmy. Oh and the official reddit app is just shit. I do hope lemmy will get bigger.

[–] ruffletuss@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh wow, it's great to hear from a fellow healthcare professional!

I'm a 5th year med student who switched to using lemmy once my favourite app, sync for reddit stopped working :(

I'm a huge tech nerd too and while I do love the culture here, I find myself occasionally wondering if there are any communities on lemmy focused on medicine and/or medical professionals.

Would you happen to know any that you could recommend?

[–] AirZone@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Not that I know of, maybe you can open one 😉

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

C'mon........16 is old now. Once you hit senior in high school, it's all downhill from there.

[–] Crudman@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm normier than the listed demographics and find the Fediverse and it's associated jargon to be inline with 4 dimensional crochet in terms of ease of use

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[–] heimchen@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I saw a pull on Mastodon and only 4% said that they were under 18

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[–] AVeryCleverName@lemmy.one 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I spent most of my time on Reddit in the learn programming subs, so I'm glad at least that demographic has moved here. I'm almost 34, don't work in tech but want to, don't use Linux but want to (and if the rumors of windows adding ads to the OS are true I will switch to Linux full time except for gaming). I wasn't really that invested in the reddit API changes but I liked reddit when it was more under ground and wild west. I used to spend a lot of time on rcsources (those days are behind me regardless, though). So I wanted to see if there was still room on the internet for the outlaw tech cowboy shtick, and Lemmy stepped up to the plate.

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[–] FinallyDebunked@slrpnk.net -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, that why I blocked most of them, this is not a fucking Linux forum, you nerds, even if it operates on foss

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