this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/fediverse
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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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[–] PhantomPhanatic 10 points 1 year ago (2 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] 9 points 1 year ago

This is a problem for potential growth.

And? That's good. Facebook grew originally by being exclusive. You had to be in college, and in a particular college. Lots of things grow by invite only.

People love exclusivity, even if there is no reason for it. Apple maintains exclusivity through cost, for basically the same hardware. As long as instances have more than like 500 users, they will be fine.

Lemmy already has growing pains. Why would you want to make them bigger? Let the owners grow their instances at their own pace.

[–] [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