That’s how Reddit was for a long time too, and Reddit still is more like that than the other social networks. For whatever reasons that demo is more likely to be early adopters of this kind of platform. Diversity comes with growth.
Because Reddit was made for nerds, until more recently it didn’t try to attract the mass with shiny interfaces and promises of social recognition like FB and Instagram.
This is where the major problem is. Most people simply don’t care about anonymously discussing stuff. It’s always about status. You simply have to show off your flashy avatar and your NFTs.
I mean the whole concept of the fediverse is inherently going to attract the more paranoid of people who don’t want to have big tech down their throat 24/7. The people most aware of this are those that work in/adjacent to big tech, and have enough understanding to be genuinely concerned about the state of the internet. Not that you have to be in tech to use/enjoy the Fediverse, but Lemmy is inherently inconvenient and less content rich than Reddit so it’s going to create more niche/less diverse communities who have common interests.
Tech also has a very large trans demographic compared to the general population, and you can see that reflected on Lemmy too. The whole platform is largely going to reflect tech demographics until it is well known by the general public.
I’m just glad most people here are nice and willing to have open discussions. I’ve seen more threads of people disagreeing and reaching common ground than anywhere else.
I also don’t really want Lemmy to get as big or have the same exact demographic as Reddit. I do want it to get bigger and more diverse than it currently is since there’s still not enough activity (although it’s way way better than it was) and not enough niches. There are only so many star Trek memes I want to see.
One issue with Lemmy is that it’s too anonymous that it doesn’t really support content creators who actually want to be known. I know influencer is a bad word, but platforms do need people to share original content, and there’s less motivation to do really high effort, high quality content when you can’t verify yourself. Lemmy has no lack of memes but nobody is using it as a platform for quality OC that takes more than a few minutes to create. I think that could be fixed by there being an instance dedicated to hosting verified users for people who want a non anonymous account, so when you see a user is from that instance, you know they’re the real deal, and that would encourage content creators to establish a presence. Right now, how am I supposed to know a handle is legit when there are thousands of instances that can have the same usernames, and people can even create their own instance?
