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?

  • nfntordrEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    38 year old moderately tech savvy person here, much more hardware savvy than software if that makes sense? When the whole reddit thing exploded, I concluded that I was pretty much going to stop using reddit once Boost stopped working. Then I saw someone mention Lemmy in a comment so I searched it up and here I am. I didn’t know there was a reddit alternative, or a Twitter, instagram or YouTube (decentralised) alternative. Just finding out all this now. I didn’t even think of centralised VS decentralised until the last few days, this is all new to me and still wrapping my head around the whole federation concept, particularly with the Meta etc. I feel like I need an ELI5 on that concept but I’m still yet to search and find if an ELI5 community exists here lol

    But I think it makes sense that the demographic might be older. I don’t want to shoehorn any age group into one large generalisation but I’d dare assume that under 30-40s are happy to be where their peers are? And to be clear, I’m not an instagram/twitter/tiktok user. And I only use Facebook for a side business I ran and it’s marketplace.