Fediverse

Hey I'm a younger tech nerd

TL;DR: it's just that the current state of the Fediverse is more attractive for that demographic than for most other people.

NTL;R: It's a damn complex subject but I'll try to simplify it.

Let's pretend for a moment that each user is a perfectly rational agent (they aren't, but it's a useful model). A perfectly rational agent will stay in the platform that offers him the most subjective value. And subjective value is tied to a bazillion of factors, among them:

1. lots of content that the user wants to see, and it's easy to sort it out from things that he doesn't care about.
2. lots of people whom he'd like to interact with, and it's easy to avoid people whom he'd rather would not.
3. liking the interface and experience of the platform itself.
4. the feeling that the platform is reliable, and won't suddenly stop working.
5. agreement with the premises, goals, and values of the platform; etc.

Note that the weight of each of those factors changes from user to user, even among perfectly rational agents. For example, Alice might think "I'm fine with a shitty interface" (low weight for #3), while Bob might think "I can't stand an ugly platform" (high weight for #3).

Now, let's think about the differences between the Fediverse and "corporate media" in those points. For the first four factors, corporate media is clearly at an advantage, due to: network effect, network effect (again), age of the platform, and more money to throw at their user experience. For the fifth one, the Fediverse is at a big advantage, but only for users who care about open source and transparency.

And who cares about those things? Older, tech-savvier users, who are likely to also use Linux. For those, factor #5 weights so much that it compensates the cons of factors #1 to #4. But for the others, factor #5 is non-existent (they do benefit from the open nature of the Fediverse, but they don't weight it because they don't care about it).

That applies to the current state however. The Fediverse is growing, while Twitter and Reddit are enshittifying themselves; so over time there'll be less of a gap on the first four factors, promoting further migration to the Fediverse, even among people outside the demographic that OP narrowed down.

By the way, someone in Mastodon created a poll that confirms your "gut feeling" of most users being 30yo+.

I'm in my early 20s :(

I do want to try switching to linux though

Picking a server/federation is too complicated. Don't need to look elsewhere. For most people, a federation is a kind of country.

More importantly, there's not an easy way to get into this. You first need to learn what lemmy is, how it works (because nerds can't simply tell how you can do it, they need you to understand how it works first), and then where and how to register.

What's lemmy is done ok: it's reddit, but better.

How it works? People don't care. Most of you don't know quantum mechanics, yet that's what allows the cpu and gpu to work. You know how to plug it in a computer (maybe), and you know that hitting the power button starts the computer. That's what people need to know for lemmy. I'm not sure there's really an entry point for normal people with an adapted tutorial.

Which lead to this point: honestly, lemmy is not ready for most people. Accessibility just isn't there yet. It's not so much that it's hard to do any of the actions required. It's more that it is a jungle. You first need to choose a federation. And for that you need to understand what it is, because people who run lemmy servers won't tell to go on a default server. This is the first problem. People need a way to know where to go to get an account. They also need an app for most, which is not completely obvious.

I don't mean that things are badly made, just that the resources to enter lemmy are targeting a specific audience still.

That all it would take: an easily accessible place where it tells you to go on any lemmy webpage on the list, register, and how to get started with the feeds. What is there is close, but not yet good enough.

Honestly, from all the Gen Z and younger kids I know in my life the big thing that's probably killing the fediverse is it's not a media-first platform.

Not a one of them really participates in text-primary social media, which is what Lemmy definitely is.

Mastodon supports it better, but there's so much gatekeeping around the "right way" to share media content that the few people I know that tried to use it just bounced off it because they couldn't figure out the technical and social aspects of how to interact, because it's just piles of conflicting opinions.

They will, however, spend an insane amount of time on TikTok or Youtube or Twitch or Instagram or Snapchat endlessly watching whatever comes up and scrolling along to the next thing or sending pictures/videos of whatever they're doing at that moment to their friends.

To answer your question, for the non-tech-savvy having to pick a server is, yes, too much of a leap. We are conditioned in the industrialized capitalist world against making decisions we don't understand.

If we want to market it, we could make a wizard that randomly designates a server from a set of cooperating servers. Include also reminders that a user can join multiple servers and each one has separate rules (say, regarding posting NSFW material even to appropriate communities.)

I just talked to a Redditor who was entirely unfamiliar with the recent changes at Reddit.

Lemmy is still in a niche stage. Perhaps needs more exposure to attain more groups of people. Not sure how you came across those stats but I'm glad that I'm surrounded by matured community of human beings.

17 year old tech enthusiast here

I've seen and even tried to run a few polls on age (mostly on mastodon and microblogs).

The age demographic of the fediverse definitely leans as you think ... on average ... Xennial tech/academia/nerd oriented. Not too sure linux users are too dominant though.

As for more diverse users? This isn't mainstream (yet?). There's a lot of inertia around the big-social era. It lasted for a long time relative to the history of the internet, ~2008-2022, ~14 years, which is nearly as long as the internet had been around for before then. So many are stuck in their ways and stuck on the idea that there's only one or two places to be online and they're on one of them, the "right place". I saw someone on twitter just yesterday say that they'll stay on twitter until it goes down and then never go anywhere else because they don't want to bother with another social media platform.

It seems that the idea of a monopolised internet is breaking apart and fracturing now, which is a good thing, but not completely good across the board. Where for instance should emergency information be broadcast? Previously I would have checked twitter before mastodon without blinking. Now, Lemmy might actually be pretty good for this (only realising this now as I write). So there's also a dimension of kinda believing in the big/monopolised social media. This is likely more prevalent amongst younger people, from whom, for example, I've heard ideas like that decentralisation is some weird tech-libertarian ideology and that the "town square" is actually a good thing and something that should be committed to. As far as anyone that has any commercial interest in their social media profile like businesses (both small and big!) or journalists, not being the town square, and the lack of apparent "engagement" and "virality" on the fediverse is definitely a turn off. And of course having those types on a platform naturally attracts others. All of which is not to mention that the decentralisation thing is something your average person just doesn't have the time or patience for and the insistence of some of the people on the fediverse that you should learn about it and that it isn't hard are off-putting to some.

In the end, we've reached a bit of an impasse it seems, where we've culturally outgrown the idea of an important service like our online existence being at the mercy of private corporate whims, but don't have a clear way out. Accepting that the internet is diverse and not monopolised may just take some time.

Where the fediverse comes in is that it gives you both a fractured and diverse social media space but also the ability to connect anything to anything with a standardised protocol. It's a powerful idea, just like that of the internet itself, and whether it's activity pub or some other standardised protocol, I hope it makes it.

I'm a jeweler 🤷🏻‍♀️

I feel the two big reasons are:

1. The average user of a site like Reddit probably hasn't noticed any significant changes; or if they have, they just don't see them as a problem. So they don't have any significant incentive to emigrate to another site. On the other hand, people who are tech-savvy notice the changes; and decide they need to move.

2. To a lot of people, the Fediverse is just not as convenient as centralized sites. People who are more tech-savvy and/or use Linux, are willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience in exchange for using a site they see as better.

It's also worth keeping in mind that right now, the Fediverse is still in its early days. Every site in its early days generally has a broadly similar userbase- people who are familiar with technology and willing to put up with some inconvenience because they see the potential.

What you calling me out like this for?

That’s just how the internet works. Early adopters are those willing to try something unfamiliar.

21 yo software dev here, so not quite older, but I'd say I fit the tech nerd bill lmao

While a lot of people are conscious about the software they use, I think being involved in tech, either as a hobby or career, ups the chance that a person will care about things like user privacy, how an app is run, algorithms that might manipulate the user, or even how technologically literate the rest of the community is

And that isn't to be condescending towards people who are more apathetic about it. It's like how a doctor might be more behooved to eat healthy; when you've seen and studied what can go wrong, you're more compelled to avoid it

Gen Z is really bad at technology, and I don't know how long it will take them to get good.

OK, 3/3, but I should get points for only running Linux on WSL and Steam Deck. I'm not a nerd.

Edit: and my two android phones and my router.

As long as it has enough shitpost it will attract young people. We need to shitpost more.

Enjoy the benefits of having a higher barrier of entry while it lasts. /gen

I mean, if you started a social media club and there was a dearth of over-30s tech people, that would be a pretty telling thing wouldn't it?

The whole if you see a bomb technician running, you better run thing.

Reddit was where we were when we were younger tech nerds, so...yeah man.

I also fit the description. I wonder if I see the internet differently having grown up pre Web 2.0. With tech corporations cracking down on user freedoms, I can't imagine jumping ship, say from Twitter to Meta, and expecting to be treated any differently.

As a nerd, I'll use a platform that works the way I want, even before the content is there. Hopefully as the amount of content grows it gets more diverse and normies will take interest.

The simple existence of different instances will be enough to scare away casual users.

I'm not entirely sad about this.

Probably because tech enthusiasts are the only ones that care about their privacy so they use open source alternative before anyone else

"Hey just fyi, I post all this stuff first on my site at noschool.angelfire.com, but i realize people are all here on Xanga now, so I copy it here too. Anyways:

These lemmy users are really making me stress about my age, as if my back pain wasn't enough. I guess I just need to accept it. I have too much going on to be worried about that anyways, i still need to get the rest of those songs downloaded for the mix cd. Kazaa is taking forever to download, but soulseek is ZOOMING at 300kbps, so there's that. Once i get my domain and stuff set up, and my blog system going with Greymatter, let me know if you want to use one of my subdomains for your blog. Anyways i'll be on aim later if anyone is bored."

Hit the mark on all 3. 🤷‍♂️ But in fairness the early days of Reddit was pretty similar.

Phase 1: Collect enthusiasts

Phase 2: ?

Phase 3: Profit

Reddit has tried lots of things in Phase 2, including borrowing many techniques from Facebook, but they're still fundamentally there.

I don't think there's much keeping users outside that demographic away, more so that the fediverse is a tech solution to the reddit problem, so naturally the people that flock to lemmy are the type of person that looks for tech solutions to the problems they experience in daily life.

My mother just had her illegal IPTV streaming box stop working recently, was her solution to find an alternative? No, she simply stopped watching her shows and did other things instead, and complained about it. And that's with full denial of service, not just limited/compromised service like reddit users currently experience.

It wasn't until her tech-savvy nerd son set up another IPTV box for her that she was able to resume consuming the content she wanted to, and similarly lemmy won't really take off until it reaches a critical mass where enough tech-savvy nerds have shown regular people Lemmy as the tech solution to the problem they're facing. What's holding up progress with that at the moment is that the reddit problem for most people isn't significant enough for a regular person to be in a position to do anything about it, even if they are directly inconvenienced.

"Exclusively?" No. But obviously its initial appeal was to the more tech-savvy and FOSS-centric sort, and it's byzantine enough to jump in that it dissuades many newcomers who try.

But ActivityPub does seem to look like it will pull in larger services (like Threads) so in the end "protocols over platforms" may win out by default, sorts like WebKit/Blink/Chromium has. Not everyone gonna use Brave or Opera, but the mass of Chrome users will still feed back in some fashion.

As for the ages here, the people most likely to migrate are the long term Reddit users that have had an account using third party apps since 2010 or so (because younger people have only ever known the official app). That self selects for anyone that was old enough to use Reddit in 2010 back when the user base was mostly high school / college / recent college grads. Someone in their late teens / early 20s back then will be in their 30s now.

I just joined and I suspect that you're correct: there's an overall learning curve. No snarky tone intended, but explaining decentralization to those who would likely struggle with grasping the basic client/server model is going to be challenge.

Shoot, I've got 10 years pentesting and R&D under my belt and it took me a while to weigh the pros and cons of creating an account on a public instance or self-hosting. (Will self-host eventually...enjoying a test drive.)

Fucking zoomers with their tiktoks and snapchats, what was so wrong with old school forums?

13 year old Linux tech enthusiast here.

I dont think 30 is that old

FB was only for college kids, now it's for your grandparents.

Absolutely tick those boxes. And it makes perfect sense.