Politics

I would say that resistance to learning new things is not necessarily generational. It might get harder the older you get, but if you’re a baby boomer and are extremely familiar with how smart phones work, then you had to learn that technology as an adult. Like, the original iphone came out in like 2008. The youngest baby boomer would have been in their late 40s when they got their first smartphones. You don’t get to say “old people don’t like learning new technology” and “boomers only know how to use things on the smartphone” at the same time, because the material evidence for that is explicitly contradictory.

Primates can use smartphones. We've made the format so user friendly we have other species which can meaningfully interact with it. You don't really "learn" how to use a smartphone, the designs are just that good now. Apple holds 57% of the cell phone mobile market, and their UI is nearly perfect for usability.

I have no metrics around user age groups cross referenced with occupation for federated social media. But I’m pretty sure you don’t either, so I’m not sure where your confidence on that statement is coming from.

There is like 70 thousand accounts across all of the lemmy instances, I'm sure people have multiple at this point to deal with limited federation. We have no metrics because this is all brand new and no one is collecting metrics, heck we don't know if anyone will even collect metrics, the whole thing could become a dead mall before someone gets around to it. My hypothesis, which is by definition just a hunch, is that we can make some pretty strong guesses on the demographic makeup of lemmy. I would suspect the makeup is predominantly center left people in the united states who likely work in tech of some fashion, aged 24 to 35, and the younger demographics are going to skew left/far left (lemmygrad) and LGBT (Blahaj/196). I obviously have no solid evidence of this, I'm just going off the activity levels of the various instances. The OP in this question was whether lemmy was actively hostile to conservative viewpoints, and my response to that was and still is there isn't going to be much of a conservative slant for lemmy yet because they have no reason to be here yet they have other social media that is infinitely more active than any lemmy instance.

Okay…just to make sure we’re on the same page: you do understand that if 44% of something comes from one thing, then 56% must necessarily come from something that is NOT that thing, and 56 is a bigger number than 44, right? Like, this specific statement directly contradicts itself.

I'm not sure if you missed the context I was going for, or are purpoefully misconstruding it? Reddit was a tiny website in the overall scheme of internet traffic wasn't it (this is actually a question, I'm pretty sure it was very small overall), the vast majority of the internet is browsed through mobile devices, reddit was an outlier. Twitter, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, facebook, all of them are browsed in the majority on mobile. The demographics skew even more towards mobile when you go world wide and not just the U.S. Mobile devices completely dominate the internet worldwide.

Your underlying statement was based in a foundational premise that conservatives were too old and/or stupid to figure out how to use Lemmy, therefore Lemmy was “naturally” insulated from conservative perspectives. And now you’re saying they won’t join Lemmy instances because they have better existing options.

Yes, because none of those conservative groups are a monolith, they're a much of a "big tent" as the left is in a lot of ways. Hardcore fascists aren't browsing tiktok, they're in smaller cells that converse in IRCs and other very hard to find niche groups. Run of the mill conservatives are mostly on things like voat, facebook, truthsocial, the_donald, basic run of the mill shit. There's a big difference between your average conservative genx father and someone who would be right at home on stormfront. Just like there's a big difference between your average live/laugh/love suburban mom who has a left slant and wants people to be happy, and a hardcore leftist that would gleefully put a billionaires head under a guillotine. There's nuance and niche group within niche groups within niche groups.

Also, remember dude we're on a very small instance, this isn't reddit, we're likely going to get to know each other relatively well if we frequent the same instances and conversations, this isn't reddit where we're going to get lost in a sea of accounts. Things are small enough that we'll probably recognize each other on other instances. Just like back in the day when forums and image boards were gaining big traction. Lemmy is where Reddit was 12 years ago, and where 4chan was 20 years ago.