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?

  • CrunchyBoy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    100
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Younger folks have been raised on apps and other polished devices with oodles of effort put into UX design.

    Older folks grew up learning DOS commands, memorizing the IRQ of their sound card, and other clunky shenanigans.

    In their current state Lemmy, Mastodon and other services are too complicated for most young folks to bother with. Not all, but most, especially the filthy casuals.

    • Addition@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      39
      ·
      1 year ago

      This is the answer. I’m 26 and most of my peers didn’t really use the internet beyond the occasional usage of the school library computers until Apple released the first iPhone. By that time places like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit were up and running.

      That’s all their experience with the internet is. Polished experiences through dedicated apps on extremely popular platforms. Now those people have had kids and all those kids know is the same thing. It’s all apps on phones and tablets.

      Lemmy: A) Is too complicated in it’s current form for those types of people to effectively understand and use.

      B) Lemmy is currently emulating a type of early internet experience that only nostalgic older millennials nerds crave. General users tend to prefer bigger platforms.

      • TheWoozy@dmv.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Lol, older millenials never saw the early internet experience. UUCP, FTP, Gopher, Mosaic, et al.

      • Brkdncr@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Most people didn’t use the internet when the first iPhone came out either. That shit was slow and unusable at the time, and locked to AT&T.

    • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      I mean, Reddit killed off ‘polished UX’ and that’s what drove me here. All the great 3PAs are on the Fediverse, after all!

    • koopercupp@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m 26, probably among the oldest of gen z. I love lemmy. The quality is higher here because the community is smaller. There are much less reports than there used to be on reddit.

    • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      “No, I can’t come out tonight, I’m optimizing my CONFIG.SYS file so I can have a mouse AND my Soundblaster work at the same time!”

    • EliasChao@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      I use Ivory for browsing Mastodon, and I’d bet that the app is more polished than any other first-party social media app.

      The problem with Mastodon (and Lemmy to some extent) is that the onboarding process is not as straightforward, thus causing some friction for the less tech-savvy users.

    • wolfcatreader@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Word! I feel active learning and feeding off one’s brain curiosity diminished for younger folx.

      With that comes laziness to “set things up”. “OMG, it’s too complicated for me. I’m having a headache. I can’t, I just can’t.”

    • OverdueSandwich@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Couldn’t agree more

      We are used to Comfort and once you are used to it (or even never experienced else) its hard to lay it off for other benefits

  • illah@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    59
    ·
    1 year ago

    My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo.

    While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era.

    Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.

    • jscummy@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      First thought when I read the title. Surprisingly, the early adopters of a new, not particularly user friendly tech platform are the same as people who use other niche technologies

    • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      If we’re talking efficiency, the fediverse isn’t particularly well optimized either. It’s just a trade off for decentralization.

    • Schooner@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Even as a crypto enthusiast, the web3 movement smelled like VC manure being dumped on a field hoping something grows.

    • bittabet@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      While most crypto/web3 ended up being get rich quick schemes for their founders, I actually think that the main weakness of lemmy right now will be funding for the long term. So some sort of web3 type micropayment system may need to be the eventual alternative if you don’t want a reddit style ad infested experience.

  • ZagTheRaccoon@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    41
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    aka: early tech adopters!

    these folk are always the ones trying new things, especially anti-corporate things. They aren’t keeping people away. this is just how the bleeding edge of new technology. The communities natural grow out over time as more people show up and start to outnumber them. But it’s thanks to them that niche new stuff gets supported in the first place while it builds up it’s audience (and reduces the friction to joining)

    • pythoneer@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      In reddit’s early days, it was exactly like this. I remember that it felt like a Linux user forum, but with some conspiracy theorists. I actually feel that lemmy is a little more diverse than that.

      • anticommon@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        My first interaction with reddit was to explain how ballistics work in a BF subreddit.

        Man who knew how much time that comment cost me in my life.

    • anticommon@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      Without hobbyists most all new recreational activities just won’t take off. People don’t become professionals and things don’t become usable until those who have more passion and time than sense tackle it first.

  • erasebegin@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I’m new here, and new to federated applications (and fit OP’s description perfectly). This federated stuff is going to remain niche unless somebody figures out a way to make it approachable.

    Reddit first time:

    > open app
    > choose some things I like
    > see all the things
    

    Lemmy first time:

    > open app
    > ?????
    > google how to use it
    > choose a... server? 
    > ?????
    
  • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    That’s what I’m here for lol. I mean this is how reddit was when I first started there. Same with digg

  • Walt J. Rimmer@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    1 year ago

    Early adopters of almost anything tend to be niche. These Threadiverse sites are looking to pick up where pseudo-message boards like Digg and Reddit left off without being extremist havens like Voat and other bullshit. So let’s look at who the early adopters of those sites were. Because… They’re not that dissimilar to the demographics that you’re describing. Reddit didn’t start out as the kind of place that just anyone went to. It tended to be tech heads in their mid-twenties or older, gamers, and chronically online people. They tended heavily to be male. And there tended to be some… Really unfortunate widely-shared opinions.

    As Reddit grew, it changed. But it took time. It took there being content on Reddit to appeal to a wider set of people. And that’s going to be the case here. It needs to reach a first sustainable mass where enough content is being created to engage and keep the users who first joined it. But that userbase is going to be rather similar. There are always going to be subgroups that are different, but for the most part, the same kinds of people are going to be the early adopters. Creating a breadth of content that will appeal to more and attract a wider variety of users over time will help people feel more comfortable with it.

    And, yes. The Fediverse is kind of weird to most people. I was in an argument the other day where someone was insisting that saying you saw something on Limmy or KBin was wrong, you saw it on the Fediverse, and could everyone just stop being wrong please. That kind of pedantic culture is only going to make adoption even slower than it already is. Because most people, they like to go to a site and create a login to look at that content. The Fediverse isn’t really that complicated, but it takes a little jump in how you think about websites to go from something like Twitter or Facebook to something like Lemmy or Mastadon. But people were kind of confused about the leap from message boards to social media like MySpace and Facebook as first too. They came around. It took time. It took exposure to the content. It took people using it and sharing it.

    So, yes. The Fediverse is mostly a monoculture right now, focused on the people most likely to make the most of out it: Tech heads with some time on their hands for hobbies. The kind of people who either might make their own Fediverse instance or who would know the people that would. Those tech heads aren’t exclusively Linux users, they’re not exclusively over the age of thirty, and tech heads aren’t exclusively the user base, but yes, we’re going to start out seeing an imbalance. That’s normal. That’s to be expected. What’s going to be concerning is if five years from now we have the same or a worse imbalance. That will mean that the Fediverse is stagnant or shrinking instead of growing. That will be a time to rethink some strategies for sure. But for right now, all we can do is be active, share the site with other people, and try to get it to spread to more diverse demographics.

  • 001100 010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Am I too young? My age is 19-22. Oh now I think about it, there is no teenagers community. I feel old for being here.

    As for tech enthusiast, maybe. I’m always impressed with open source software, but I don’t understand coding.

    Linux user? Well I played around with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Tails, but at the end of the day, I still switched back to Windows just because how much they’ve dominated the world. It’s hard to find programs for linux, especially games. Wine doesn’t always work, Virtual Machine is just too much of performance degregation. Maybe Linux isn’t meant for me.

    What’s keeping young people away is kids these days just like to use things that are already popular. iPhones, Nikes, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube. None of my classmates from high school know what Linux is, know about the Snowden leaks, think iPhones are the best because everyone else is using them (I’ll admit, I fell victim to peer pressure and got an iPhone, but now I switched back to a Galaxy so I can install apps without a corporation approving it, and I gave the phone to family.), wants 200 dollar shoes, constantly on mainstream social media in class, disrespect teachers even the nice ones. I mean kids these days just don’t care, they want to have fun with minimal effort, they aren’t gonna spend 5 minutes to try to understand the fediverse.