Fediverse

Saw a couple polls over on Mastodon about just this thing and it was very much skewed to people 35+. It's no a platform the youths are on, but that can change as the fediverse gets some traction and works on that on-boarding experience.

I'm 3 out of 3. Sorry I don't have a good answer for you.

My unfounded guess is that this demographic has seen the internet at it's beginings and is more willing to put up with the lack of bling and willing to discover/ build things from the ground up, just like the Forums of the Old in the mythological era were done. No corporations, no low effort rewards, no likes/ karma/ whatever. You have to actually get involved for lemmy to live.

I think it’s because we remember a time when there wasn’t a lot of stability and centralized content. So the absolute shit show that is going on right now and the resurgence of decentralized content is really refreshing. Plus it’s pretty amazing that the forums we came up using can now talk to one another! Now if we could only bring back XMPP 😂

• 28 (fail)
• Game Programmer (pass)
• Windows user (fail)

Younger people and casual Reddit users never left Reddit. People who were ok with still using old.reddit didn't leave Reddit. When I first joined Lemmy.ml during the blackout, the website struggled to load, the communities were hard to find or non existent, and there wasn't much content (compared to Reddit).

Now that Reddit is dead to me, Lemmy has filled the doomscroll void. I do much less of it now. Also, Lemmy is growing in the right directions.

I fit the profile

I'm not that old! I'm still a linux user and tech enthusiast though, so you're not that off.

My take today after observing for some weeks, is that Lemmy fills all MY needs. Reddit will probably not die. Threads seems to be a hit.

I just don’t care enough. Yeah, I wish everyone stopped using Reddit and Meta apps, but Lemmy is certainly not ready for 500 million new users right now anyway, and if they were, moderation would just be hell again.

I haven’t used Reddit since Apollo shut down unless it’s the only place still I can get in touch with some business, and I’ve blocked Threads on my network and devices.

I’m very happy with this. It would be nice if some cool, open source, free, tolerant and loving network would pop up to save 14-18 year olds and our next generation from manipulative commercial SoMe, but honestly Lemmy would probably never be that.

My only concern currently is that lemmy.world want to allow Threads for the time being while I see absolutely nothing to be gained from that.

Younger people may be more affected by social pressure, to be on the already popular apps.

For everything except the memes I agree. The memes are clearly not generated by 30+ year olds though, and there are a lot of memes. (all of those 196 communities)

If 'getting in' would be more mass compatible we would have a more realistic view about society. That would bei great but the society is of douchebags and this is what mass social media is suffering from in my mind.

Only 2 of those 3 (age, linux)
If you ever had to configure your xorg.conf to not set your monitor on fire, the fediverse isn't very complicated

Follow #art on mastadon and you see how active that community is.

I (37M) am a broadcast TV tech director so I guess that puts me in the "techbro" world, however, I wouldn't consider myself an "early adopter." I'd say really I'm just tired of corporate social media and all the algorithms and BS. And I'm not alone.

Why am I on Mastodon and Lemmy:

I was looking for something genuinely different, something human focused, something better. Hopefully the Fediverse can be that and hold the line against the likes of Meta. I've gotten four people in my close friends circle to give Fedi a try on three different platforms, all within the last two weeks.

My solution here:

We can't expect hobbyist server hosts, pro bono web devs, and volunteer modmins to pay to advertise this place. Memories of the marketing classes I was forced to take in college are screaming at me right now that what we need to do is begin an honest to goodness word-of-mouth campaign for the whole of the Fediverse... and by that I don't mean "posting aggressively" about it on Facebook, Reddit, Threads, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitter, BlueSky, etc, etc.

Scary as it may be to some of us "techbros," we need to go touch some grass and actually talk to people in the real world. "Word of mouth" means face to face, in person, and it's possibly the most powerful advertising tool ever devised. I'd genuinely advise taking a cue from fundy Christians... evangelize... talk to your friends, your family, your co-workers about what you like about the Fediverse and what they might like. Listen to their problems with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, TikTok, etc... offer a possible solution that they could give a try. Obviously, don't be pushy or a dick but also, if they do take the leap, help them get settled. Help them find a platform they'd like and how to find the communities and users with whom they'd like to interact.

Perhaps there are some onerous barriers to entry to places like this, but there are loads of people out there genuinely looking for better online communities and just better social media in general. This place -it's various platforms and numerous instances- can be that for a load of people, but they won't know about it unless we tell them.

It's funny if so - I was so old on Reddit. But this means I'm old enough to remember Usenet so this platform is comfortable for me.

I don't think it was difficult at all to sign up though, doesn't seem like a barrier to entry.

Working aged zoomer here, it's amazing how much my generation doesn't know about computers in some aspects and how much they know in others. It seems I was born in a sweet spot when things still difficult but not completely dumbed down.

Branding is also another factor that comes into play here. Most regular users are used to having a more polished app. Simplicity is the driving force behind apps like tiktok and Instagram. They build on top of each other rather than reinventing the wheel. So it's just a transfer of skills and patterns. With the fediverse, regular users have relearn those patterns and skills, which most people just aren't going to do.

One way to solve this problem is to just abstract the idea of the fediverse. Rather than saying "join the fediverse, we're decentralised" we could say "we're a multiverse of internet communities".

I also dont think regular users care about whether a post is from another server or not. This can be abstracted as well by only showing the community not the server. What I'm trying to say is, even though the fediverse is a decentralised network, we need to treat is as a centralized one.

I feel a little bit called out with this, indeed 31 years old, tech enthusiast, I am an IT-tech and I use both Windows and Linux as desktops and servers. 😆 Maybe it's just because I remember how much better the internet used to be in some ways.

I'm definitely coming up on 40, but I am not a tech nerd at all. I think Linux is wizard magic.