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?

  • Heastes@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away?

    One aspect is that federation is definitely a bit harder to wrap your head around technically.

    But I think another large contributor is the fact that culturally, the zoomers never really grew up with things like independent forums. I’m 33 and back in t the day it was very common for me to be signed up to many different forums for my different interests. Over time, I’ve seen the centralization of those communities, forums shut down and centralized services like Reddit, and lately Discord took their place.
    I remember a time when the internet wasn’t solely controlled by a handful of organisations, I can see the value in federated systems. But someone who only knows centralized services and walled gardens is likely to fear the wild, or at least won’t value it as much.

    //edit: Another thing to keep in mind, is that it’s just very common for this demographic to be early adopters for tech products and platforms. I remember when Twitter started, and a large part of its early user base was people in their 30s or older who were very into tech, or journalists. The reason I started using Twitter towards the end of the 2000s was because most of the podcast hosts and regular contributors on the TWiT network were using it.
    Seems to me that if you want to launch a social media platform, your early adopters are either guys who are into tech and in their 30s and 40s or teenage girls.

    • Ishigami@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m 21 with zero tech background. But I wanted a reddit replacement so bad that I somehow figured out how to use Lemmy lol.

      I still don’t understand how it works and how to make my own community, but I’m happy just getting to comment and post. Being part of the birth of a new social media is also nice.

      • StarshipLazy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Welcome! Hope you have fun!

        Don’t worry about understanding - all you need is patience and a hard skull to break through the more user-unfriendly pieces.