Federation is complicated enough that under 30s and over 50s haven't caught on much yet.

Be the change...

I'm actually a 15 year old, but I still use the fediverse

Will then, I found my people.

I don't think that the fediverse is exclusively used by "older tech nerds", but as someone who matches all three points you mentioned... I must say, you're still a good observer. XD

But it's logical. The more experienced tech crowd is the starting point of it. They are the ones not only able to see the flaws of corporate platforms and complain about it, but also with the technical skillset to just say "Fuck this, we make our own.". If you're not into computer stuff, you simply won't be able to create and maintain an alternative. And it also takes at least a little bit of both life- and coding / web / tech experience to get to that point, so the age is also a given, at least for the initiators. Younger folks may like what's happening and be joining in. And Linux runs the web. It dominates the server space, so the people who are working with it might also use it in their private life. Some others simply enjoy their OS and software not being bloated corporate spyware for the advertisement industry. So they are attracted early as well.

Don't worry though. "Older tech nerds" are regular people, too - with other hobbies and preferences, things, pets and people in their life. So the nature of the fediverse is... community. People stuff. And that is fully compatible with other demographics. If they have enough of the likes of Reddit and Meta, they will find a compatible alternative here for their needs. But that doesn't mean the fediverse has to replace those big tech platforms. People have choice, you know. And things can coexist. I'm perfectly fine with the size of Lemmy's community. Reddit refugees are highly welcome, but I don't worry about the user count, as long as there is a reasonable amount of interaction.

This is literally our lawn

Yes, that's how I know it has legs.

From usenet to reddit, the internet spaces that began by attracting a critical mass of internet/tech experts and enthusiasts are always the ones that end up going the distance.

You don't want to rush this place going mainstream, I promise. Enjoy it while it lasts.

That was once true of reddit. If this is going to be a successful model it will diversify over time

It was the same for reddit in the early days

If the people posting on 196 are over 30 years old, then you guys have really stepped up your game.

Yep, that’s definitely me…

I think it’s really more about being an “early adopter” to something rather than following the mainstream. Tech enthusiasts tend to have more patience with minor inconveniences that come along with new technologies.

The average users will show up when their friends start using it and talk about it more. I still have people in my everyday life that don’t understand and don’t use Reddit, no chance they’ve even heard of the fediverse.

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.

IMO, most likely boils down to a few things:

-Lack of awareness, because the reddit protest was more of a vocal minority than a lot of people realized. For the mainstream crowd, even if people were upset, they didn't care enough to actively search for an alternative. Even if they did, there were instantly a bunch of small team projects trying to bank on striking gold the way Reddit did when digg failed. This meant that support was splintered across multiple platforms and there was no post that even hit the majority of front pages or r/all that said "okay everyone, we're all going to lemmy.world" or any other alternative.

-General confusion around the tech\platform and how it works. While it may seem to tech people that it isn't any worse than any other site, just the concept of "picking a server" is a barrier to entry that makes a mainstream person think "oh I have to do research, maybe I'll do this later." I don't know if this has been fixed yet, but as of a couple weeks ago there was some techy syntax to be able to properly link to content from outside servers properly if you'd viewed it and copied the link via your server.

-Older tech focused people tend to have self selected for caring about technical issues and searching for solutions to the issues they encounter. They tend to want control over their technology, and have it be open source or decentralized. The confusing nature of the fediverse is a lower barrier to entry for them.

-Performance. Performance was fairly poor at the critical moment when the apps got shut off, even if it's improved now.

-User friendly dedicated apps that didn't have a barrier to entry, like a warning that it was "early access" and granted devs special access to user data to help develop the app, were not available.

-Content. Because of all the aforementioned, there's just not the user base and content yet to populate all the communities people want with enough fresh dopamine drip to grab all the mainstream lurkers. If Lemmy continues to grow and attract quality content though, there will eventually be a critical mass, because people usually go to what's the new hip place after the early adopters have paved the way. Once you start getting a sizeable chunk of teenagers here and they start telling their friends "have you heard of Lemmy? It has less of that lame boomer crap" then you'll see mass adoption. Alternatively, if the older tech folks end up just posting things that aren't seen as hip\cool, that moment may not come.

510 comments. I think you hit a nerve 😆

We're the generation that used forums all over the internet, Digg, and then reddit before it was cool. Now that reddit is going nuclear, we're all looking for our new home because we yearn for the internet we all grew up with as it slowly erodes away thanks to millionaires/billionaires ruining all that is good to make a buck.

You forgot: uses dark mode.

Is picking a server/federation too complicated?

Apparently anything beyond filling out a registration form is too complicated for a lot of people. Heck, even that seems to be too much for some people, hence the popularity of login with Facebook or Google features. Personally I'm happy to be away from people who can't figure out simple concepts. But, I'm the exact person you described in your post, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am 46 and started my career in tech but now work in another industry. I think it’s people with inquisitive minds rather than an age demographic. If there is something new and cool to check out in tech and it’s easy enough for busy people to understand I am all over it.

Tech enthusiasts have always been the early adopters. They're the ones who see the potential for a new platform and migrate to it first. Recall that the internet itself was just a thing for nerds for the longest time.

Somebody has to be first. It isn't going to be people who are only going to follow, it isn't going to be people who are going to leave when they realize that none of their favorite people are on there. Going to be people who have some kind of vested interest in trying this new and interesting thing.

As for the relatively older age, I hate to say it but a lot of kids think that technology is consumption. It's a big problem. In a recent shocking employer survey, employers talking about the lack of tech skills among gen z. This isn't an isolated data point, either. There's a lot of data suggesting that kids are growing up as experts on TikTok and Facebook rather than fundamental skills that would let you go out and do something like run a website.

There's a poll about the age of Mastodon users currently open... More than **34 000 ** voters until now! The results are interesting: more than 80% of users are 28 years old or more... More than 40% are more than 40 years old.

Is Mastodon the social network for grown up people?

https://mastodon.art/@jsstaedtler/110668308409683502

24 y/o artist here :0

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+.

Hey I'm a younger tech nerd

I'm in my early 20s :(

I do want to try switching to linux though

I have found my people

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.

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.

I'm a jeweler 🤷🏻‍♀️

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.

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.

Ill take it as a compliment to be considered among such folks.

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.