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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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I know this comment could receive some negative feedback, but Lemmy lacks diversity in its userbase, compared to Reddit (or Tumblr in the old times). It's just a feeling, when I scroll through comments and posts on Lemmy, I picture most of the users as 16-46 yo white males.
EDIT: changed "45" to "46", see comment below.
That’s the vibe I always got from Reddit. But yeah, the vibe I get from Lemmy is that there are two demographics.
19-45 white male tech enthusiast and 19-45 white trans female tech enthusiast.
I'm not sure yet which one I am ಠ_ಠ
Oh damn, your certification ran out?
cmon dont call me out like that :3
Which is interesting. On the early days of Digg it was the same demographic, although more politically center. Then in the early days of reddit the same thing happened. It was mostly Linux and tech. So having the same starting demo is not a bad thing, but the question is, will it grow to adopt others
That's how Reddit was for a long time too, and Reddit still is more like that than the other social networks. For whatever reasons that demo is more likely to be early adopters of this kind of platform. Diversity comes with growth.
Because Reddit was made for nerds, until more recently it didn't try to attract the mass with shiny interfaces and promises of social recognition like FB and Instagram.
This is where the major problem is. Most people simply don't care about anonymously discussing stuff. It's always about status. You simply have to show off your flashy avatar and your NFTs.
I like how reddit thought NFTs were going to save them
I mean the whole concept of the fediverse is inherently going to attract the more paranoid of people who don't want to have big tech down their throat 24/7. The people most aware of this are those that work in/adjacent to big tech, and have enough understanding to be genuinely concerned about the state of the internet. Not that you have to be in tech to use/enjoy the Fediverse, but Lemmy is inherently inconvenient and less content rich than Reddit so it's going to create more niche/less diverse communities who have common interests.
Tech also has a very large trans demographic compared to the general population, and you can see that reflected on Lemmy too. The whole platform is largely going to reflect tech demographics until it is well known by the general public.
I'm just glad most people here are nice and willing to have open discussions. I've seen more threads of people disagreeing and reaching common ground than anywhere else.
I get more of an impression that lemmy is full of far left leaning programmers. I think that is a good subset of people to have on a social media platform. But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.
The reason you don't get many "normal" people here is that the community is absurdly hostile to anyone on the "normal person" spectrum.
If you're not a software-pirating techbro obsessed with "privacy," a leftist, or a furry, this place generally shits on you.
I very frequently post incredibly lukewarm takes for any mainstream community, and literally get called a Nazi. I have stalkers lol.
I, personally, tend to have "normal" views but significantly more resilience to online communities than "normal" people - which is why I still come here. Most normal people left back before this place even defederated from Hexbear. They ain't coming back.
Until mods of what are essentially "default" communities get serious about growth instead of wanting "their" spaces, Lemmy is never going to grow. Most people don't find getting blasted with piss-takes by Marxists funny the way I do.
Case-in-point from this thread
https://lemmy.world/comment/6400270
Oh and one directed at me, right on schedule.
There's a reason why quite a few instances have blocked hexbear.
I block those people all the time here and it's made the experience very enjoyable. It's a small enough community where blocking is highly effective.
Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake? Rage comics and lolcats brought huge numbers of new users to reddit and the quality of content immediately began to decay.
Maybe a social media site that runs out of content is a good thing.
It's actually desirable. Without subs on more topics (which should also mean people discussing those topics), Lemmy is not a viable alternative for the people who want to focus on content. And this is particularly relevant for more niche subjects because of how the scale of conversation works. I should know. I created two communities (technically magazines on kbin, but same idea) but until people come to them, I'm ~~mostly~~ fully just waiting there, fingling fingers.
Not much we can do about that. That's just the demographic an experimental decentralized platform like Lemmy attracts.
This comment will also receive some negative feedback but I don't care about diversity in my social media platform. I actually want people to enjoy the same things I do, like Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc.
That's the opposite of diversity I guess. More like a community where people have similar interests. That's what I like about it.
Eh, that is kinda the appeal of Reddit, and its alternatives. Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed.
I always say the magic of this model is that it's not just a firehose of every possible interest, it's more like a shower of dozens of tiny handpicked jets. It just happens that on Lemmy, the "All" feed is still reasonably tailored to the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit's recent decisions enough to make a change.
That's exactly why I simply cannot not go back to reddit from time to time. Lemmy is nice and all but all communities that are not focused on tech stuff are complete ghost towns. Sure, one could say, that I should create the content and post it here. But I'm simply not that kind of person. I seldom come up with interesting stuff to share, but enjoy interacting with the posts of other people, writing a comment here and there. And I'd say many if not most others are similar.
Do fledgling communities typically START diversified? I would imagine it always starts this way. You invent the thing. You send it to your like minded friends, they send it to their like minded friends, etc. I feel like diversity inevitably requires time and numbers.
there's no way you could even guess the skin color of a person by reading their comment. i could be a 70-year old asian man for all you care.
maybe because "race" just isn't discussed as much because it's also basically a social construct besides minor evolutionary differences.
People of different background have more chance to have a bigger diversity of point of view. You may not be able to guess the background of a single commenter, but you can spot things missing. Also, I wasn't actually thinking about race, but gender identities and sexual orientations as well.
Race is a social construct that impacts so many people in a very real way. The race that you're sorted into affects so much of where you can go, what you can do, and how the government treats you.
Yeah there is not nearly as much to be learned here which is the major appeal of reddit to me. I already know what the comments will say before I open a lemmy post
Hey now.
I'm a 46 year old white male.
I agree completely.
I don't have examples at hand now, but I feel like I see so much like minorly-sexist talk. Or at least the stuff I only imagined horny men write, in so many threads.
Reddit was the same like ~10 years ago and I don't miss that part of it.
I don't feel like we're ever going to get past that until we can make the sign up process very nearly effortless. Reading about signing up for an account on the fediverse can be a lot of new info. Choosing an instance can feel like a lot when new to the fediverse and at the point that it becomes something difficult or confusing, a lot of people just lose interest.
I agree. I am a techie, have been following Lemmy for quite a while before the Reddit exodus. When I made my account, first I had to understand that each instance manages its own accounts and there are many instances. My initial thought was to look for one of the higher population instances, but I read that this was not necessarily the best idea. Then I searched out why its better to pick an instance outside the high population ones and that whatever instance I picked, I could view/comment/vote on posts from other instances. I don't have a problem doing research, but I don't know anyone who is not a techie that would continue past my first question, and that is a serious problem for adoption.
It definitely lacks diversity. But at the same time it reminds me of the early internet where we had dedicated forums like IGN. Most people weren't on these forums nor cared to be there. The problem here is sometimes Lemmy is not welcoming because of the way it is designed. You have to host and run your own instance or join someone else's instance. That is good because we, the users of Lemmy, own it but bad because we become very protectionists. We want to protect our instance from bad actors but some users take it to the extreme and protect the instance from people who aren't like them and think differently.