Fediverse

“Older” “30 years or more”

HEY

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.

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.

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)

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

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? 
> ?????

If I wasn't a tech nerd I would have given up on signing up for Mastodon and Lemmy. There is a lot of focus on how instances work and it seems a bit overwhelming. I had a lot of internal, 'what if I make the wrong choice', or 'how can I move if I don't like the community' type questions. So being the nerd I am I researched the crap out of it and overwhelmed myself and said fuck it and just chose the popular instances since I know that I can move at a later date.

I personally think this format is favored by a lot of the demographic you mentioned. Most of us, I am generalizing here, grew up being active members in bulletin board systems. Then Reddit came along basically murdered the BB, but there was a good community to interact with. Now Reddit is basically unusable in my opinion because the community doesn't care about the content or the people behind the screen. That brings us here. We learned so much of our trade, laughed a lot, and made real friendships on these types of system and it is a place a lot of us feel comfortable.

I'm Gen Z, don't use Linux, don't know the first thing about programming (I know how to use file explorer though), and never intend to learn, and I'm here because I don't wanna use the official Reddit app and because I'm convinced that the Fediverse is likely to become big in the future and I wanna be able to say I was here when it all began.

I'm 36. I'm tired of everybody taking my money. I'm tired of corporations. I'm here to get away from that.

That profile is very much the early adopters of any new platform or technology. If you described the early users of the internet as a whole, it would be very similar.

I don't think anything particular is keeping other users away, it's early. We need evangelist, I suspect that most normies don't even know the fediverse exists, let alone are considering using it.

We just need to continue to grow the reach of the fediverse, don't give up if it seems a bit bare and give everyone else a reason to join us

I don't know what you're talking about, I'm just your average Hollywood celebrity here to promote my new movie "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.

Oh yea. One additional demographic too--super excited young people. It's large.

It's just early-adopter types so far. We're not exactly what I would call a "major service" yet.

I don't want to stereotype anyone, but in my own social experience, younger groups don't give a shit about corporate monopolies or privacy, they just want things to work fast and automatically (ex: TikTok). And those I know in older brackets are still on Facebook and complaining that they don't want to deal with change because their family/business/workflow would be affected.

I happen to be 38, a linux user, and a gamer. And I concur that my age-group has just always seemed to be more open to new technologies for some reason.

30s software engineer / linux user here.

We are exactly who you want as the "primer" user group. We will collectively make sure the whole thing works before the load really rams up.

I think anyone that fits in those 3 categories just tend to be the early adopters. The normies come later. 😁

Is picking a server/federation too complicated?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Literally the single biggest problem with fediverse adoption, brought up in every discussion about migrating to it. It will never replace centralized sites as long as it remains confusing and complicated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14t9t66/im_so_lost_is_there_an_easy_mode_to_the_fediverse/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LemmyMigration/comments/145epgc/looking_for_a_lemmy_website_try_lemmyworld/

These are the people who make everything work. After they get it all setup and working, the kids will come flooding in, don’t you worry

Old tech nerd here. Is this the meeting spot?

im 15 and other websites just suck lmao

Yes. Reddit was probably the same for years.

Yeah.

It's fuckin' great! 😄

I perfectly fit the described persona.

I think whoever is here now cares about the federation/open source. If you don't care about this why would you be here instead of reddit with more active communities? You need active communities to make people that only care about the content to switch.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away?

One aspect is that federation is definitely a bit harder to wrap your head around technically.

But I think another large contributor is the fact that culturally, the zoomers never really grew up with things like independent forums. I'm 33 and back in t the day it was very common for me to be signed up to many different forums for my different interests. Over time, I've seen the centralization of those communities, forums shut down and centralized services like Reddit, and lately Discord took their place.
I remember a time when the internet wasn't solely controlled by a handful of organisations, I can see the value in federated systems. But someone who only knows centralized services and walled gardens is likely to fear the wild, or at least won't value it as much.

//edit: Another thing to keep in mind, is that it's just very common for this demographic to be early adopters for tech products and platforms. I remember when Twitter started, and a large part of its early user base was people in their 30s or older who were very into tech, or journalists. The reason I started using Twitter towards the end of the 2000s was because most of the podcast hosts and regular contributors on the TWiT network were using it.
Seems to me that if you want to launch a social media platform, your early adopters are either guys who are into tech and in their 30s and 40s or teenage girls.

I would say lemmings age are 25 to 45. People in this range are, in my experience, the most technologically educated.
Gen Z is somehow terrible with anything outside basic android/ios.

That always happens when a new platform is born.

Tech/nerds are always the ones moving first because they don't mind the quirks, they're not scared of bugs or instabilities.

They start building up communities until the platform is ready for the rest of the people, it was the same for reddit, tho it happened so many years ago the new people wouldn't even know about it.

Good. I don't want to see some teenagers doing some dumb dance or whatever is on normie platforms.

Oh goodie I'm all three. I am the venn diagram. I am the monoculture.

Are you asking if new technology is used by nerds? Lmao.

Who were you expecting to be here?

No wonder I feel at home.

I also fit that description. I find it to be more true of Lemmy than Mastodon, but the same thing was true of Reddit's early userbase. If anything, it was more extreme; the first people to find Reddit were lisp programmers, which is a couple orders of magnitude more nerdy than Linux users.

Lemmy is used by tech nerds right now because that's who the early adopters are for any new tech that doesn't aggressively target mainstream users with a big marketing budget. Much like Reddit did, the way to attract mainstream users here is to grow communities relevant to their interests. If you're reading this and you have interests that aren't tech, you can help. Join or create a community about it, post original content there either exclusively or before anywhere else.

Of course there's some UX work to do on Lemmy itself. That's to be expected with a software version starting with 0. I don't think federation is inherently too hard for mainstream users to understand assuming they've seen email. An onboarding experience that picks a server for them from a list of defaults would probably help - some apps do that, but join-lemmy.org doesn't.

I think so. I think younger users trust official branded apps a lot more so actually see the Reddit app as safer. Despite how easy tech people think lemmy and mastodon are, picking a server just isn't a feature to non-tech people - it's an obstacle to getting started.

The lack of content is a problem, but the lack of community feeling is the actual offputting part. Having bots repost things from Reddit kills the organic feeling of interacting with another user.

I'll probably be flamed but I do think having such a homogeneous userbase is negative. It means you don't get a wide array of experiences and viewpoints. People bang on about echo chambers online, but if you are in a club full of old white guys then you're in one!

I'd like think we can make these platforms as welcoming for everyone of all backgrounds, genders, etc, but there's just some things we can't understand without having those viewpoints being represented.

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

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

Be the change...