cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3804525
Wow, things have changed since I last posted in /c/fediverse. Here are the top five most active instances based on monthly active users:
- lemmy.world: 19516
- lemm.ee: 3779
- lemmy.ml: 2970
- sh.itjust.works: 2355
- feddit.de: 2293
Anyone from Germany care to comment on why this is? Y'all seem to have such a large presence on here compared to others
I'm from another nation-oriented instance that has an outsized presence, right next to Duitsland.
My guess is:
What is DACH?
German-speaking countries in Europe. Deutschland (Germany), Austria and of course the Confœderatio Helvetica (Switzerland).
It's the country codes for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Deutschland for the D, Confederation Helvetica for the CH). Those are the three countries with a majority of their people speaking German other than Liechtenstein, which is extremely small
It also means roof and is reminiscent of Dachsprache. One of those unreasonably neat acronyms.
And in particular it's the vehicle registration codes, ISO 3166 for Austria is AT (hence also the TLD).
I think one reason is the large number of German users on the Internet. With around 100 million speakers, German is the second most spoken native language in the West after English.
According to the application texts, many users seem to come from various podcasts. We are also "endorsed" by one of the largest German-language subreddits on its front page (r/ich_iel). Our users have also started to watermark their memes, which occasionally attracts new users. Feddit also made it into an article in a popular IT magazine (heise).
~~Wait, isn't French second with 210k?~~
~~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_languages ~~
Sorry, misread, you are correct about native speakers!
Is Latin America not the western world? That would add another 200 million or so Spanish speakers.
Aren't Spanish speakers on their own link agregator, https://www.meneame.net/ ?
No idea. But they said "German is the second most spoken native language in the West after English" whereas the wikipedia article is on Europe, so that would exclude Latin America if it's part of the west. I believe if they are included, they absolutely dwarf the number of German speakers.
It seems that it's not that clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:Western_World_Latin_America_torn_countries.png
It's a good question though why there are so few Spanish speakers here (or at least visible).
Generally internet culture In the Dach region is very active and forward looking, and potentially ideologically aligned with the idea of Fediverse and generally FOSS software and privacy. E.g. for Wikipedia language share German got overtaken by Spanish only within the last 5 years slipping from 2nd to 3rd suggesting some early adopter and internet participation higher than the norm.
Subjectively a lot of people here have uneasiness with big tech, and are relatively informed about alternatives.DACH on Reddit was also very big, and very ideologically opposed to API changes and general Reddit corpo behaviour. Subjectively again Dach and ich_iel felt like home when I joined, essentially like the Reddit culture I was used to, just with a little more progressive views across the board.
Also I suspect that German language speakers are fairly active within the English speaking parts of the internet in general, while Spanish and French as well as other non Germanic languages seem to have more disdain for English language content and sites, Germans and Dutch as well as Nordics are very comfortable with English as a common language.
Thank you for your feedback!