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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founded 2 years ago

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Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 94 points 2 years ago (23 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

This is a problem for potential growth. The language surrounding the Fediverse, the people communicating it's strengths, the wild west flavor, and the content within the sites themselves are going to be geared towards that demographic. Late Gen-X and early Millennials are probably going to feel at home here but if we don't work towards making the Fediverse more inclusive to other demographics it won't be adopted as much as we would like.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Boomer, here. The fediverse is the first thing I've seen that has the potential to replace the old USENET (also a federated system). Unfortunately, Lemmy has similar weaknesses/vulnerabilities to USENET which was destroyed by SPAM, high resource (compute, bandwidth, admin time...), and an influx of newbs (AoL).

Like reddit, Lemmy discourages long lived threads, which is unfortunate. But the longer Lemmy remains the home of linux geeks, the better, IMHO. I don't have a burning need to see the newest pop culture memes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Like reddit, Lemmy discourages long lived threads, which is unfortunate.

luckily we have the ability to sort posts by "New Comments" just like old school forums do

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

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