Fediverse

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.

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? 
> ?????

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)

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.

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.

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

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

im 15 and other websites just suck lmao

Yeah.

It's fuckin' great! 😄

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

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.

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

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.

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

Who were you expecting to be here?

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.

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.

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'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...

As a 30+ Linux using IT guy I feel offended lol

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 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.

It was the same for reddit in the early days

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.

This is just confirmation that I've found my people

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

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

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

When did 30 become "older"?

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.

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.

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.

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.

510 comments. I think you hit a nerve 😆

Am I too young? My age is 19-22. Oh now I think about it, there is no teenagers community. I feel old for being here.

As for tech enthusiast, maybe. I'm always impressed with open source software, but I don't understand coding.

Linux user? Well I played around with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Tails, but at the end of the day, I still switched back to Windows just because how much they've dominated the world. It's hard to find programs for linux, especially games. Wine doesn't always work, Virtual Machine is just too much of performance degregation. Maybe Linux isn't meant for me.

What's keeping young people away is kids these days just like to use things that are already popular. iPhones, Nikes, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube. None of my classmates from high school know what Linux is, know about the Snowden leaks, think iPhones are the best because everyone else is using them (I'll admit, I fell victim to peer pressure and got an iPhone, but now I switched back to a Galaxy so I can install apps without a corporation approving it, and I gave the phone to family.), wants 200 dollar shoes, constantly on mainstream social media in class, disrespect teachers even the nice ones. I mean kids these days just don't care, they want to have fun with minimal effort, they aren't gonna spend 5 minutes to try to understand the fediverse.

You forgot: uses dark mode.