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?

  • @zeppoEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. They expect that they won’t be able to understand or act on any sort of computer problem. That’s what I was hoping people would figure out from experience - that they don’t have to be scared to read it, click around and give it a try.

    I dealt with similar things when we had a fairly busy website back in the PHP/MySQL days, around 2008-09. My business partner was a great designer but not technical at all, and was a bit uptight about our site. She didn’t report imaginary problems, but if there was any sort of service interruption she’d act like it was the end of the world and stress me out about it even more than i was already stressed. I still wonder whether it would have been better to just run the site by myself.