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

submitted 1 year 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] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No I am saying to me it seems like the vast majority of confusion for new users is giving them this super long detailed explanation of federation, and/or users trying to figure out which instance they should be joining. As a new user all you really have to know is to go on lemmy.world and signup and its just like reddit.

What I said is what I've done and have had zero to worry about.

Yeah thats fair on your communities disappearing. Not really a common things thats happening though, and not something youd really notice until you used it for a while.

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

Okay, well that's a fair point, but I'll point out that communities disappearing is a lot more common than you think. For example, the single largest "Technology" community in the entire fediverse was the one hosted on beehive - a LOT of lemmy.world users were subscribed to that when it suddenly just ceased working correctly for them. That's just one example of many.

When it does just stop working like that, there's two perspectives an end user can have: a) they are new/novice users who just signed up for lemmy.world as you describe and shit just started breaking for apparently no reason which makes them think this junk is unreliable and broken, or b) they have an in-depth knowledge/understanding of how federation works and and understanding of why it broke.

Just ushering users into lemmy.world and giving them the expectation that it's just like reddit is setting them up for dissatisfaction. That is, in fact, exactly how my introduction to the fediverse/lemmy worked. I signed up, started subscribing to popular stuff without really understanding how any of it worked, and then shit just started breaking. Is that really the experience you think former reddit users should have or are expecting?