It is obviously. Just look at what Lemmy and Mastadon are. The whole concept of the fediverse is trying to get back to old school, smaller and less controlled services like message boards, IRC, etc.

Most younger, less tech savvy people don’t care about those principles. They just want a cool place with a bunch of people.

Hopefully the balance will shift a little bit to get more diversity and more users in general. In the last few days, stability issues and lack of content have lowered my engagement. It’s early days still though, so hopefully the people developing and hosting these sites keep plugging away and more people come to make it worthwhile.

Did you see the linux memes comments? It's full of windows users who are infuriating me.

I don't mind a monoculture if it keeps morons away, that's a price worth paying. The reason I started using Reddit in 2009 was to escape the comment section of YouTube. Erik from Internet Comment Etiquette has been doing sterling work educating the Mongol Hoardes but they're still not ready.

Only 1 for 3 there myself, but I get the point.

One thing I have noticed is a big chunk of the memes posted earlier in June were very dated, ~2010-era Facebook style. Made me wonder if the crowd on here didn't at least initially skew older.

It might be partially due to corrolation as well. People who don't like to be controlled by corporate overlords and be their products, tend to use/switch to open alternatives.

Absolutely It's really nice how this affects the tech related serious communities but damn is it heartbreaking how bad the memes here are

Ehhh... might be better that way. Dont whant to act like a gate keeper, but if you are refering to normies, then it better this way, since normie activity usually is politically oriented, and not in a civiliced dialogue oriented manner, specially US politics, and usually on major non isues that i rather not get into since i dont whant to sumon them, and with normie activity comes the political bots that just make the noise louder. Its the main reason that r/whitepeopletwitter never leaves the top 10 of r/all back at reddit and why twitter and facebook are full of extremist viewpoints. Now if you are reffering to other academic/profecional comunities like the historians, medics or phisicyts, then thats because they usually stay on the larger online platforms or standard publishing because they are not on the mindset of being anti-stablishment, rebelious or cyberpunk HACK THE WORLD kind of thing since their comunities are better stablished and they really have no reason to be in on some obscure platform thats really just the second best choise to reddit thats mostly used by ex redditors. Now that might change due to meta sticking their noses up in here or hopefully due to the growing comunities in the fediverse. Although with the beef some of the instances have with each other that might definetly make it harder to sell on other people outside of the alreaddy interested.

Speaking as a 23 year old windows user (though one that want to move to Linux eventually), the only one of those that I am is a tech enthusiast. From what I've hear Reddit started the same way, tech enthusiasts built it up and then everyone else noticed how good it was getting and moved in.

I am younger than that demographic and not the most techy person, so maybe not exclusively. But yes, in my experience with Lemmy and Mastodon that is the trend.

Its the BBS era come again.

Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it's annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.

Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it's not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that's just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.

People who don't care about tech don't think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don't consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.

My take today after observing for some weeks, is that Lemmy fills all MY needs. Reddit will probably not die. Threads seems to be a hit.

I just don’t care enough. Yeah, I wish everyone stopped using Reddit and Meta apps, but Lemmy is certainly not ready for 500 million new users right now anyway, and if they were, moderation would just be hell again.

I haven’t used Reddit since Apollo shut down unless it’s the only place still I can get in touch with some business, and I’ve blocked Threads on my network and devices.

I’m very happy with this. It would be nice if some cool, open source, free, tolerant and loving network would pop up to save 14-18 year olds and our next generation from manipulative commercial SoMe, but honestly Lemmy would probably never be that.

My only concern currently is that lemmy.world want to allow Threads for the time being while I see absolutely nothing to be gained from that.

Closest I’ve felt to BBS since, well, BBS.

I'd rather agree about mastadon, but not about Lemmy. I've seen people from (I assume) ~20 up to 40+. For example, I'm around 27 and I have few friends who were using Lemmy for almost a year now, they're in their early 20s.

But yes it's mostly nerds.

I'm over 30, but I'm tech stupid compared to everyone else here, but I can follow, and understand the jist ftmp of the conversation. Not my area of expertise. I grown up with the internet though obviously so I do know my way around.

If anything i'm probably just more open to new experiences than the average person, and I like learning stuff.

But in general I agree with your observations, and it seems natural for early adopters of a platform.

Only 2 of those 3 (age, linux)
If you ever had to configure your xorg.conf to not set your monitor on fire, the fediverse isn't very complicated

Saw a couple polls over on Mastodon about just this thing and it was very much skewed to people 35+. It's no a platform the youths are on, but that can change as the fediverse gets some traction and works on that on-boarding experience.

Follow #art on mastadon and you see how active that community is.

40-ish M. Potentially, we’re/they’re more likely to have been using 3rd party apps and felt frustration with the Reddit decision in the first place. Younger users (and maybe older, 50-60+) maybe just started off with the official Reddit app or Reddit is a smaller part of their “content diet” vs other platforms, so they don’t really see what the big deal is.

If true, it’d be kind of an interesting demographic shift, since the last time we probably saw something like that was with Facebook when younger people moved away from it when it became boomer territory, so maybe the opposite is happening with Reddit, with middle/older more tech-savvy users jumping ship, but I’ve no real evidence.