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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    92 years ago

    Yes, that’s why it is so good.

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

  • @[email protected]
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    32 years 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.

  • Cool Beance
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    22 years ago

    Yes. Like you said, it’s not a bad thing, but I do miss the energy younger people bring.

  • @[email protected]
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    92 years 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

  • Archibald
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    72 years 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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    62 years 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

  • Thelsim
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    82 years ago

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

  • khoi
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    32 years ago

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

  • Flax
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    36 months ago

    It’s also used by loads of tankies

  • @[email protected]
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    52 years ago

    ✅ ✅ ✅ - that’s me :P

    I had been on Lemmy before, but since there was much more activity on Reddit I didn’t stick with it. Now that more communities are flourishing on the fediverse early adopters are jumping on, and if ethe growth is stable and communities have activity (not just subscribers or visitors) to rival other spaces, I think diversity will grow. It only takes a relatively small number of active users to create a strong community

  • @[email protected]
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    72 years ago

    Yes. I have yet to run across 💀💀💀 or 🔥🔥🔥 in any reply thread as well as popular slang. Also AITA posts with some of the worst advice known to humankind. Thank god it’s over!

    Reddit evolved into in something unrecognizable over the last 5 years as it’s popularity exploded.

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    Hey! I use Windows. And because I choose to. And I really dislike any unix-like systems to put it mildly.

    The rest fits.

  • @[email protected]
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    1902 years 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.