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?
Did you just call me old? 🥺
I remember being a teenager thinking 26 year olds were old lol
Now I’m in my early 30s and while I’m not old I’m definitely not the young whippersnapper I used to be
Yes. And so am I. Deal with it.
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’m 21 with zero tech background. But I wanted a reddit replacement so bad that I somehow figured out how to use Lemmy lol.
I still don’t understand how it works and how to make my own community, but I’m happy just getting to comment and post. Being part of the birth of a new social media is also nice.
Welcome! Hope you have fun!
Don’t worry about understanding - all you need is patience and a hard skull to break through the more user-unfriendly pieces.
I have a statistical pool of 1, but I am 40 something, an infra specialist at a video game publisher and use Linux. So, I suppose you just described me
Cool. I’m all three. 😏
Me two😂
It feels very much the same type of people who were mostly hanging around the early Internet; BBS and IRC, etc. before “the general population” caught on and flooded the space.
Have to dumb it down so conservative grandpas and hyperactive 5 year olds can all have a voice. That just takes time to flush out a bit.
Gen Z Tech enthusiast here; I hope more Zoomers join.
The fact that a majority of even the older Gen Z (like me) have been reported to not understand file systems or general tech and internet knowledge is scary.
I am a fellow gen Z Tech enthusiast, but to be honest the age of users on Lemmy has never crossed my mind. But I am sad to say that I am writing this on Linux 😞.
I am sad to say that I am writing this on Linux
I think you dropped this: 👑
Ikr, ever since I was kid I was told that I am part of generation that knows it’s way around tech. Growing up and realizing that most of gen z can’t comprehend simple IT related concepts was… disappointing.
Though at least they are aware that they need to remember their own passwords (looking at you boomers).
jokes on you, every one just use the same password or apple/google automatically save them
why i answered too times?, i didn’t even pressed enter 2 times hmm
Gen X and Millennials are the only ones that really needed to go through the early stages of operating systems. Having to get anything done required you to learn a lot.
Nothing says older millennial quite like having to learn how to edit config.sys with no help from the internet in order to get the sound working for a game that came in a shareware collection.
config.sys… there’s something I haven’t thought about in a long time. That and autoexec.bat.
Lol get out of my head
Gen X and Millennials are the only ones that really needed to go through the early stages of operating systems
Yeah, we boomers didn’t have to learn them because we frickin invented them.
Down votes INCOMING!!!
I’ve known about basic computer knowledge since I was a little kid, sneaking around playing half life 2 because my mom wouldn’t let me. It’s astonishing to me that some people don’t understand even the surface level of how a computer works
I grew up with an Atari and a C64. We’d move them from room to room and you know, reconnect the cables as needed. I was confused when I came upon adults who couldn’t figure out how to connect their VCR to a TV or assemble a PC… I mean, the cables go into the things they fit into. Fuck, even building a desktop from parts works the same way.
It used to be more common for people to look at a desktop OS and just freeze like “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO”, like they’re going to break something if they do anything. I thought people would figure out wtf they were doing with computers when the internet got big, but it just led to things like tech support where you have to ask “what does the pop up alert SAY? Did you read it? What did it tell you to do?”
some people don’t understand even the surface level of how a computer works
Most people don’t understand even the surface level of how a car works, but it’s not needed, they can drive. Same with computers, you don’t need to understand how they work in order to use them, thanks to MS & Apple (no, I will not include Linus Torvalds).
People don’t need to know how an engine works, the same way I don’t necessarily know how a BIOS or a kernel work. Their understanding of computers is worse than that. For cars, they understand that the gas pedal and gear makes it go forward or backward, the wheel turns it, and brakes stop.
you don’t need to understand them
Part of the problem is that there are a lotof people who not only don’t understand, they don’t want to, and will actively try to avoid it, even if it’s required for their job. I have a coworker who will actively sabotage her tasks that involve even basic office use because she hates tech. Just yesterday she managed to lock herself permanently out of her apple account and lost EVERYTHING because she refused to do any kind of setup to make sure she knew her passwords or had her shit backed up. Years of stuff gone.
There’s a lot of people out there like that.
You can include Google as well as Linus, considering the majority of compute hardware on the globe exists due to those two entities.
Sure, but with something so powerful and versatile at your fingertips, you’d think more people would at least want to know a little more
In the other hand, I’m impressed with zoomers ability to produce contents with nothing but their phone. A 30-something old fart like me is stuck with the mentality of anything productive like video or image editing require the use of desktop, which apparently not true anymore.
So true. Those of us that became productive and proficient with PCs while growing up with desktop computers had a hard time taking smartphone/ipad productivity seriously. We got stuck in our own bubble as the phone platforms just got more capable.
Man, I feel this in my bones. I was SUCH a luddite about tablets for YEARS, and to this day I don’t really ever use my phone for “serious” things… despite the fact that my current phone (iPhone 12 - waiting for usb-c on the 15) technically has about 3x single core and 2x multi core performance compared to the computer I built a decade ago (2600KF) while using a little over 7% of the power.
I run into this issue regularly
How much do you know about the inner workings of an internal combustion engine, yet do you still drive?
It’s a good thing imo that we’ve abstracted away the complexity of tech to make it more usable. It was a pain in the ass before (so says one of the “old” techies on lemmy haha)
> How much do you know about the inner workings of an internal combustion engine, yet do you still drive?
A fair bit from a theoretical perspective, actually. I’ve got a copy of Fundamentals of Motor Vehicle Technology on my shelf and I figure 50 years ago, I’d have been one of those people taking apart and putting together a motorcycle engine during the summer instead of figuring out how computers worked.
I agree with this, but we’d need to draw lines in the analogy. For example, my CS students struggle with downloading and installing a program and don’t know how to locate find files that they’ve saved in a text editor. We’d be concerned if the people driving didn’t know where their turn signal was, hah.
A lot of students grew up using Chromebooks as their primary computer, so they’re largely limited to app stores and web browsers.
I teach 18 year olds and up. When I started, I assumed that everyone would know basic things, like creating folders or copying and pasting with a mouse. I’m surprised how often I have to teach them computer basics.
Teachers have a difficult time these days with students who don’t comprehend the concept of a hierarchal file system because iOS associates files with apps and not a directory structure.
Same! If you know of any online courses suitable for postsecondary students looking to build tech skills I would appreciate it, otherwise I might need to try getting a duty reallocation for a bit to put time into building one.
Why remember password when I can just use a sticky note to stick it in the monitor?
It’s because even children can be scarily good at specific things. I have a cousin (she’s a child) and has a YouTube channel, knows her way around content creation to a basic extent but absolutely can’t print a document or use MS Word. She was good at using phones when she was a toddler. So she got really good at the things she cared about and didn’t bother with the rest. The older generation didn’t have stuff like this to begin with, so of course they would take longer to learn stuff than a person who lives with it and around it from the time they were born.
Before 3pa were banned on Reddit I tried to convince people to join Lemmy, and the general consensus was that it was “too complicated”
Its oversimplified but yet I feel like the new generation never had to understand tech basics prior to enjoying it.
It’s a good thing overall, but yeah… Might be a bit scary too
I used to play SMITE with a kid, and he didn’t really know anything computer related. It was a bit shocking to me since I always just expected that future generations would become more and more tech literate, but I think smartphones kind of screwed that.
Smartphones truly brought computing to the masses more than desktop OSs, and true, the majority of people have no idea what they’re doing. But… prior to smartphones they wouldn’t have been using a computing device at all.
Oh yeah absolutely. It just really baffled me he first time I had that sort of interaction with someone younger than me.
There will always be enthusiasts and nerds, but I rather thought that computer literacy would be more widespread than it turned out.
Me too. In the 90s, when word processing and then the internet went mainstream, I thought that that average people would finally learn basic computer concepts and stop acting like it was super-confusing… just simple things like, what is a file? What is an executable? How do I organize my system? At the most basic, how do I plug all the wires together to set a desktop up? (This one always drove me nuts because there is literally only one cord and socket that fit together for each component).
Instead we ended up with millions of people running Windows 98 with 8 viruses at once and a desktop full of icons, and nonsense like “I’m calling the Geek Squad to come to my house fix my PC!” or harassing the youngest person they know to fix it for them. I can’t count how many times I had to fix my mother or aunt’s computer, then someone would fuck it up again by downloading HottestAlbumListenNow.mp3.exe. The current situation with many people’s Android phones is about as horrifying, with 20 spyware casino apps at once, and they don’t even know where they got them from. Around 2010, I got so tired of my mother saying “my computer’s broken! can you fix it?” that I installed Linux on her machine, and it was somewhat confusing for her for a while as in “How do I get the photos from my camera?” but entirely ended the constant virus/spyware bullshit. Eventually she got a Chromebook, which had the same advantage vs. Windows.
It’s a shame to just have to dumb things down or hide complexity but I think the best choice to give the average person a system like ChromeOS or iOS that they simply can’t fuck up with viruses or spyware. People have demonstrated that they aren’t going to take the time to figure it out.
Ugh, that all sounds really familiar to me too. Boggles the mind that people can’t plug things in, it’s just a case of finding what cord goes from where, and which port it fits in. It’s really difficult to get it wrong. I think the thing I hated the most was being called over to literally read a dialogue. “I was working on my document and this popped up!!”
Do you want to save your document? (Yes/No)
Like please, just read what it says instead of freaking out every time something pops up!
Ha! I have the exact same issue with people and dialogues, like “Okay… did you read it? What did it say?” Somehow they don’t seem to understand that there are words on the screen which are there to tell them information.
I think it might be some kind of expectation that since it’s a dialogue on a computer it’s automatically going to be something complex and technical.
A couple of years back the company I worked for developed a website for this other company. Our point of contact had previously worked with us at a previous company, so he knew people at our company already. He had the designer’s phone number (mistake) and would frequently just call her the moment he hit send on an email. “Hey did you see my email???”
He absolutely refused to learn how computers worked, at all, which was odd given his role was lead for digital marketing. One stand-out moment was when he emailed us “URGENT FIX NOW!!! WEBSITE BROKEN!” The designer and I both freaked out for a second, until we checked the site and everything seemed to be working correctly. We then asked him what exactly was wrong with it, and he sent a photo of his laptop screen. In the system tray, the internet icon was crossed out.
Dude had a laptop with one of those physical wifi switches. He’d switched it off, tried to access the website. Then gone on his phone to email us that it wasn’t working. The error message was along the lines of “You don’t have an internet connection.”
I no longer have contact with clients, and it’s a blessing.
At work I’ve been thrust into a support function for some random system (I’m in analytics) and one of the roles I work with is fairly entry level, so lots of younger folk. I have been floored by some of the basic-ass shit I’ve walked them through. (Like explaining that you can copy and paste the url into a browser if the link isn’t clickable for whatever reason. Also had to clarify what url meant–is this not a common term anymore?) I had just assumed that because they’re younger and grew up with the internet, they’d smoke the hell out of me. But I guess interfaces are so streamlined these days many got away with never having to learn basic troubleshooting the same way I did as a millennial.
URL is very much an out of date term, as far as general use goes. People think in terms of “links”, and if they understand a little more they’ll likely respond to you talking about an “address”. Most of an entire generation only really interacts with these concepts through the streamlined methods of a phone or tablet interface, which have gone out of their way to hide scary concepts like the actual file system.
Source: late-model millenial
It’s because they grew up with it rather than actively learning it. UIs have started to hide the actual details, so the users don’t pick them up.
UIs have started to hide the actual details
This is what it’s really about. There’s no need to understand the nuts and bolts because now the software obfuscates all of that.
Yupp, older zoomer here. The thought of decentralized anything seems cooler to me so I thought I’d give it a try
Im also older GenZ and I only found Lemmy and the Fediverse today
I think of myself as above average in Tech and Internet Knowledge but there is so much to know and so many things to not get.
Tech is ridiculously “complicated” in that it has little parallels to other aspects of life. Also the sheer size of knowledge you need to have to get deep into it can be very disappealing
[Example] want to set up your own vpn looking for a guide and you only see guides you have never Heard before you look up these words to understand it only to find many explinations with other words you have never seen before
Im doing my best to understand many things but I dont have the time or the motivation to Learn everything
And I think many people are like me Maybe they dont even want to learn the things because their interest are in a completely different field
Dunno maybe im just dumb idk
fellow zoomer here, i agree
The fact that a majority of even the older Gen Z (like me) have been reported to not understand file systems or general tech and internet knowledge is scary.
I think it’s to be expected. When the majority of your tech use is with a phone/tablet, concepts like filesystems are abstracted away from you.
The same goes for troubleshooting that tech, as the most helpful error message you generally get from those kinds of devices boils down to a graphic of a sad face and a completely useless “Something went wrong” type of error message.
Gen Z here 😉
Absolutely It’s really nice how this affects the tech related serious communities but damn is it heartbreaking how bad the memes here are
Didn’t you know thay tech nerds love beans and holding in their poop?
is it heartbreaking how bad the memes here are
May I interest you in some beans in those trying times?
Well heck, that looks like me. I was thinking about running back to Fidonet.
“Older” “30 years or more”
HEY
Came in to post something to this effect, you did it better than had planned out in my mind. Danke schön!
I’m almost 30, and the youngest on my work team. When I mentioned I was going to be old at 30, they practically started a riot!
I turn 30 later this year. All of the sudden everything hurts.
Oh boy have I got news for you for the next two big round numbers
When I mentioned I was going to be old at 30, they practically started a riot
I mean, to be fair, there’s been riots for stupider reasons. But probably not many. 🤣
🤣🤣🤣. Right?! Over 50. Not a tech nerd.
Yeah I’m in this comment and I’m not sure I like it.
But it does take me back to the shift from Digg to Reddit. My Reddit account (16+years) was older than so many users on the site. Nuts to think about it. The vibe changed massively over the years.
Seconding everything in this comment. I jumped from digg to reddit during the HDKEY scandal, so 16+ years as well. I remember feeling unsettled as Reddit moved into the eternal September of the later years
I jumped Slashdot for Digg, so uh…yeah :)
I jumped Fark for Slashdot :(
someone put this into the skeleton knocking on doors meme
Stop making us feel older than old
Sprinkle in some MetaFilter.
I too remember the September effect. It demonstrates that we are similarly decrepid.
Fellow 16yr Redditor! Agreed with how it changed and become pretty meh.
Haha for real. My internal monologue: “Wait, ‘older’? Aren’t most of us in our 30s to early 40s? …oh”
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.
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.
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.
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.
According to this poll, fediverse definitely skews older. There’s some sample bias for whoever is in this guy’s circles, but I think it’s relatively valid.
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.
We do need to attract young people, this is what social media do as well, very important.
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.
I think that tends to be the starting point, but the user base is expanding quickly and is becoming way more diverse. There are already plenty of users who don’t fit in that category, and I suspect it will continue to grow.
