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?

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I could never be confused as someone whose good with tech. I have a job where knowing basic excel makes you the resident tech genius we all go to for help. I can confirm that I do find lemmy complicated.

    1. It was intimidating to pick an instance (and everyone aggressively insisting it “doesn’t matter what instance you join because -long droning tech speech-” only made it worse).
    2. This is numbered cause I can’t figure out how to do bullet points on mobile…that is how out of place on lemmy I am
    3. I wish the default was all and not my local instance for my home screen. That makes it harder and more complicated for me to navigate around or see popular posts. Oh shit I think I just figured out how to do italics!!!
    4. I’m mostly just here because I like the cozy community feeling. That’s enough for me to put up with stumbling around the site next to blind just clicking on stuff and hoping for the best (I accidently ended up scrolling a sub that was all in Germany yesterday, no idea how I got there)…but I don’t blame most non-tech people for not wanting to do that. To get most people you’d need to dumb the “fediverse” down to the point most current users would be furious and start talking about enshitification again.
    • AndreasEnglish
      3•1 year ago
      1. The sign-up process can be improved. But the reason people think choosing an instance complicated is because they’re so used to having choices taken from them by social media companies, so when they’re given the choice back, learned helplessness causes them to freeze.
      2. You do bullet points with a dash or an asterisk, like - This is a bullet point or * This is a bullet point.
      3. Click on your profile picture in the top right of the screen and click on “Settings”. There is a section named something like “Default Homepage Sort”. You can change it to view the All feed instead of Local.
      4. We don’t think having dumb people in the Fediverse is enshittification. Many of the current users would be considered dumb depending on who you ask. Corporate control of the Fediverse and companies milking users for money while making the user experience worse is enshittification.
      5. This text formatting system is called Markdown, which is what Old Reddit used to format text before New Reddit introduced the graphic text editor. This page has a guide on all the formatting tricks you can do with Markdown.
      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        Im not sure its so much learned helplessness as, and I know this will be an unpopular opinion here, I don’t want to understand how it all works behind the scenes. I don’t care how lemmy is like email, I don’t care if mastodon can see me if I can’t see them, I don’t want to have to know the differences between what version/update my instance vs app is using, etc…I could learn all that, I just dont want to have too, but I probably qualify as part of the “normie masses”.

        Thanks for the link! I got on Reddit right before the switch to new reddit so I never really used old reddit. Im gonna

        be

        a

        formatting

        • fool!

        Edit: so the formatting took me like 6 tries, but I got there! Conquering Lemmy one * at a time!

        • AndreasEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Im not sure its so much learned helplessness as, and I know this will be an unpopular opinion here, I don’t want to understand how it all works behind the scenes.

          “Learned helplessness” isn’t meant as an insult, it’s just a way to describe… well, this. The idea that the internet is too complicated and you’ll never understand it so don’t bother trying. This is not the fault of the “normie masses” but rather society not treating digital competence as a necessary skill. Society has many more complicated systems like law, finance, insurance and property that people can still navigate!

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            I didnt take it as an insult, I just disagree with its use here. What I mean is that it’s not learned incompetence, I’m speaking specifically for me. I’m fully capable of learning how this stuff works and I know I could, I just dont want to. I just dont care about tech stuff, it bores me. The same way some people don’t care about the rules of football, or the way contract law works, or the difference between needle lace and bobbin lace, that’s how I feel about tech. I could learn it, I’d just rather not. There are a lot of people like me who don’t want to learn this stuff because they don’t enjoy it and like it or not that apathy (rather than inability, real or imagined) is a strong barrier to entry for something like lemmy/the “fediverse”