The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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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?
Yep, that’s definitely me…
I think it’s really more about being an “early adopter” to something rather than following the mainstream. Tech enthusiasts tend to have more patience with minor inconveniences that come along with new technologies.
The average users will show up when their friends start using it and talk about it more. I still have people in my everyday life that don’t understand and don’t use Reddit, no chance they’ve even heard of the fediverse.
Inconvenience… You mean we’ll put up with shit that just isn’t an issue with consumer products lol
Consumer products that are backed by R&D money while the website you’re typing on right now is made by average people working together…
The statement isn’t wrong, though.
Of course, the difference is money, no question about that. Lemmy has two underpaid devs. Reddit probably has a hundred. Lemmy instances are hosted as cheaply as possible, while Reddit has a massive budget for that.
But that doesn’t change that there is a real difference in quality. My Lemmy instance (feddit.de) frequently throws errors about being overloaded when I try to access it. Can’t remember that ever happening to me on for-profit social media (I guess, except of Twitter, which I don’t use. But Twitter can hardly be counted as for-profit by now. It’s more of an involuntary non-profit.).
Search and SEO are pretty bad on Lemmy. There are frequently desyncs in federated content. There are lots of small and larger bugs in Jerboa or the Web UI.
UX isn’t great. There are many things that still need to be sorted out.
And yeah, all that is annoying, but me as a tech enthusiast have the patience to power through it.
But if I’d convince my wife to use Lemmy, she’d probably end up throwing her phone.
For non-technical, non-patient people to use Lemmy, it will have to improve quite a bit, and I believe it will maybe get there some time. But it’s gonna take time. And probably, we as tech enthusiasts will have to do something we really dislike to do: Pay for development and hosting somehow. Freeloading only works if there are ads and enough people who don’t know what an adblocker is. That’s not the case here, so long-term, we’ll probably have to pay for something here. (e.g. here https://www.patreon.com/dessalines)
The fediverse is a bit confusing too IMO, and it will be changing too I bet which will make it even more confusing.
Is there any place tech enthusiasts, early adopters, Linux people hang around? I mean today it seems like here is the answer :-)
Maybe this isn’t the place but I’m shooting my shot:
I got a serious question to ask&discuss but I haven’t found a good place (it’s about a new type of decentralised tech)
