Fediverse

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 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.

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

The Reddit migration was probably mostly people who know what an API is so that fits your demographic.

Also, people generally don’t take a stance on something unless it affects them personally. So API, privacy, data collection etc just doesn’t register.

Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it's annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.

Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it's not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that's just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.

People who don't care about tech don't think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don't consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.

The youth have an innate pressure to follow trends and their peers. They need and crave social acceptance while still lacking the means to be independent and "go their own way", so it's not viable to expect younger users to form the bulk of pioneering users of an unproven platform like the fediverse.

Older user will generally be more confident and independent, especially when the craving for social approval is not as powerful as it was in younger users.

Yep :p

heh

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 called out, although I'm not quite in my 30s yet.

Also... Reddit started out in the same way, mostly as a forum for programmers and nerds

Op too young to realize who made Reddit popular to begin with.

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/

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

Oh c'mon, 30s is not older.

Well it's new open source tech that can be self hosted by the 30+ tech nerds that have the money and interest in it.

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.

Noooooo.

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.