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?

  • @krayjEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Okay, well that’s a fair point, but I’ll point out that communities disappearing is a lot more common than you think. For example, the single largest “Technology” community in the entire fediverse was the one hosted on beehive - a LOT of lemmy.world users were subscribed to that when it suddenly just ceased working correctly for them. That’s just one example of many.

    When it does just stop working like that, there’s two perspectives an end user can have: a) they are new/novice users who just signed up for lemmy.world as you describe and shit just started breaking for apparently no reason which makes them think this junk is unreliable and broken, or b) they have an in-depth knowledge/understanding of how federation works and and understanding of why it broke.

    Just ushering users into lemmy.world and giving them the expectation that it’s just like reddit is setting them up for dissatisfaction. That is, in fact, exactly how my introduction to the fediverse/lemmy worked. I signed up, started subscribing to popular stuff without really understanding how any of it worked, and then shit just started breaking. Is that really the experience you think former reddit users should have or are expecting?