The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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linux users
There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.
I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?
Thoughts?
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.
Geeks, Normies, Psychopaths, in that order. As the theory goes anyway: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Geeks start something, Normies turn it into a thing, psychopaths infiltrate to make money off of it and either make it huge or ruin it or both. We’re at the beginning stage of Normies arriving on the fediverse. Still mostly geeks. Zuck’s threads potentially joining the fediverse is alarming because it’s the psychopaths already at the door.
To buttress this point I’d like to point out that this software we’re all running is version 0.18.
I’m not even inviting friends an family yet. I’m still troubleshooting my own experience. I’m not even able to use Lemmy on Firefox on my desktop for some reason.
Reddit used to put their source code on GitHub and people would go in and help fixing bugs or use it to understand the quirk of the system so they can better integrate their 3rd party apps and bots. I still can’t believe they threw away all of those community goodwill.
We saw it as community, they saw it as free labor.
I still can’t believe they threw away all that free labor.