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?
I also fit that description. I find it to be more true of Lemmy than Mastodon, but the same thing was true of Reddit’s early userbase. If anything, it was more extreme; the first people to find Reddit were lisp programmers, which is a couple orders of magnitude more nerdy than Linux users.
Lemmy is used by tech nerds right now because that’s who the early adopters are for any new tech that doesn’t aggressively target mainstream users with a big marketing budget. Much like Reddit did, the way to attract mainstream users here is to grow communities relevant to their interests. If you’re reading this and you have interests that aren’t tech, you can help. Join or create a community about it, post original content there either exclusively or before anywhere else.
Of course there’s some UX work to do on Lemmy itself. That’s to be expected with a software version starting with 0. I don’t think federation is inherently too hard for mainstream users to understand assuming they’ve seen email. An onboarding experience that picks a server for them from a list of defaults would probably help - some apps do that, but join-lemmy.org doesn’t.
After dabbling with Mastodon twitter clones for a few months, Lemmy seems so much easier to understand and get up and running and feeling like you’re part of a more active community than Mastodon was for me. I can pretty much tell anybody to go sign up at lemmy.world from a computer and they can figure it out for the most part.
Onboarding is rougher with Mastodon because it takes active effort to find people to follow and get people to follow you. Lemmy puts posts from a bunch of communities right in front of you.
True. But at least the main Mastadon app has a little tutorial to help you pick a server. Maybe Lemmy needs one like that. Or we can just tell people to go to Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works or our own small instance like I have.