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?

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    Absolutely It’s really nice how this affects the tech related serious communities but damn is it heartbreaking how bad the memes here are

  • @[email protected]
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    1441 year ago

    That’s what I’m here for lol. I mean this is how reddit was when I first started there. Same with digg

  • Archibald
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    71 year ago

    Branding is also another factor that comes into play here. Most regular users are used to having a more polished app. Simplicity is the driving force behind apps like tiktok and Instagram. They build on top of each other rather than reinventing the wheel. So it’s just a transfer of skills and patterns. With the fediverse, regular users have relearn those patterns and skills, which most people just aren’t going to do.

    One way to solve this problem is to just abstract the idea of the fediverse. Rather than saying “join the fediverse, we’re decentralised” we could say “we’re a multiverse of internet communities”.

    I also dont think regular users care about whether a post is from another server or not. This can be abstracted as well by only showing the community not the server. What I’m trying to say is, even though the fediverse is a decentralised network, we need to treat is as a centralized one.

  • @[email protected]
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    91 year ago

    Yes, that’s why it is so good.

    I guess we are the ones remembering how it was 15+ years ago

  • mucu
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    1 year ago

    I’m 17 lmao that’s literally me.

    But yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate

  • Thelsim
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    81 year ago

    Bah, I’m three raccoons in an overcoat.
    Who… have a steady IT job… dang it.

  • khoi
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    31 year ago

    Hmm, not sure. But I’m in my 20s and I love to advocate for privacy and decentralization.

  • @[email protected]
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    91 year ago

    This is a constant cycle.

    Tech nerds invent new technology/platform>nerds flock to new thing>the masses hear about it and start flooding it>money notices a large user base that isn’t being complete wrung out for money>money destroys the new thing by making it unusable for profit>repeat

  • ugh
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    31 year ago

    I was ready to argue that we’re not all older, but apparently I’m in that category. I’m not very tech literate or use Linux, though.

    I think someone else got it right. Younger people didn’t live through dial-up and the old internet. They grew up with polished apps and fast loading websites. They’re used to convenience.

    It can be intimidating to join the fediverse. I was intimidated and still a bit confused. It’s not something I’m familiar with in the slightest. I’m not scared of challenging myself to learn something new in tech, though, because of the generation I was born into. We grew up experimenting with the crunchy internet and awkward technology.

  • @[email protected]
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    151 year ago

    Fucking zoomers with their tiktoks and snapchats, what was so wrong with old school forums?

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    I’ve literally just signed up because of the Reddit policy changes killing off third-party apps, and I’m already confused by some of the conversations on here about the “fediverse” and some stuff about Threads and EEE (whatever that is).

    I’m just like, I wanted an alternative to Reddit, what the hell is all this? 😂 Even signing up to this was confusing and I consider myself more tech-savvy than most. I think the process needs to be made simpler to encourage more ex-redditors to sign up.

  • @[email protected]
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    51 year ago

    43 here. IT consultant. Have been on every social media platform since Myspace all the way back to Usenet if you want to consider that social media which is what is basically was. On the major platforms these days, I mostly lurk and DM with fam and friends along with small Discord groups. Since joining the fediverse, and more specifically Lemmy, I’ve been much more active commenting and posting then I’ve been in years. I actively encourage friends and fam to join, but the fact is the fediverse is young and isn’t as user friendly. It has to reach a critical mass of ease of use and user adoption which is what’s being driven up right now like all other platforms before it. The more people join, the more it will be streamlined, feeding back to usability so more people discover and join, etc. etc. This is how all platforms evolved except in the case of the fediverse, it isn’t controlled by a single entity which has its pluses and minuses. I don’t expect MetaThreadBook, Reddit, Twitter, et al to go anywhere anytime soon, but diversification and competition is always good. If we can reach critical mass with the fediverse, it will provide a good check against these monopolistic entities and hopefully result in better overall communities and interactions.

  • @[email protected]
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    121 year ago

    I think the federation system is quite a barricade for some people. I recently changed over to Lemmy from Reddit, and it was quite challenging to first understand how it worked. Also I am not sure that I even now understand how this works fully.

    Also the smaller community on Lemmy might be a turn-off for some people.

  • @[email protected]
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    1851 year ago

    My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo.

    While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era.

    Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.