this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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To try and answer the question of why so many of them. Please note this is broad generalizations:
german people have large privacy and date security fears. This has kept them off of many other platforms. Most people in my friends circle never had a MySpace / Facebook... Being in an anonymous space like here is nice.
they also are and have been technologically behind in many ways. Bringing them slower to other platforms that they would have started off on, making it so they didn't use any. Ignorance and fear of technology and privacy fear combined with being technologically slower meant they were going on other platforms in a time when the platforms were getting known as "bad, mentally harmful, data mining & selling machines".
English language skills are lower in Germany (outside of Berlin). Many tourists don't see this as they go to touristy things (hotels, attractions) where they speak English. It is easy in platforms like this or reddit to be in a German speaking bubble. People who speak lots of English like their neighbors the Dutch, would more likely just post in English as everyone can then understand it.
Source: my opinions - but I do live in Germany.
While it's true that Germans might value their privacy more than others, the fediverse is incredibly niche and most people either use the big corpo apps or nothing. Also lemmy is not anonymous, at most maybe pseudonymous.
I really don't get point 2. Isn't being a member of the fediverse rather advanced? But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?
I'm Gen Z and almost all of my friends know English well enough to have a conversation online. Granted, I work in IT, but not all of my friends are technology people and this still holds.
Counterpoint: I think Germany is just a rather big Western country with many technologically interested people and people who value fediverse ideals like being free from corporate influence. There are dozens of us!
On here I have no friends, no connections, and my irl name is not attached to my account. So closer to anonymous than for example Facebook. It's harder for just any user to track down things about specific users.
lemmy is nich but not advanced nor hard to use. I like it because it's super simple. The point has nothing to do with Germans being able to use lemmy, but rather they did not start off using other programs or apps (z.B. MySpace Facebook) in the 90s and early 2000s as soon as other people like Americans. When these apps started they were great and had no negative feelings to them. When Germans came around to start using them in larger numbers, they already had negative issues. So they never started with these apps like others did in other countries. This is likely very different for you, as you are much younger. All of this stuff existed already when you were coming into adulthood.
sounds like you have a great friends group. I also have many experiences with German people who speak English very well... As well as many who can't. I have both English and German only speaking friends. I spoke nearly zero german when I came here. It's hard. Cashier at rewe, anyone working at Bauhaus, nearly anyone in the small town I was first in. Some cities aren't much better. Some of my employees speak zero functional English and they are young. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is a big difference in Germany and somewhere like Holland.
Yeah I get it, it feels somewhat anonymous, but if you look, it's really not. I use my usual Internet Pseudonym and if you search for it you can probably find my personal website quickly. As a German, I've had to put an impression there even. Reminds me, maybe using my Pseudonym everywhere is something I should avoid, but then again, I've grown attached to it. I follow ich_iel on here and also read comments there. It's a small community and you just know the regulars after a while.
It's not hard to use if you already know it, but I feel were forgetting the majority of the population that is absolutely not well versed in technology. I occasionally listen to a podcast that addresses the social media trends of the week, and in many episodes they addressed the fediverse once. And it was only mastodon for them, they didn't even get the name right, and they didn't really get federation too. I feel like it's true that it's not hard to use, but it seems like it's still hard for the average person to get into the fediverse, presumingly caused by the network effect and the fact that corps can't milk us dry and take all our data. The decentralized nature makes it hard to grasp for "normies".
Yes I have great friends and love them very much. I don't have a lot of English only friends. Someone in my family is married to a man from England, and I got to know a few of his friends, it was all great. True that even in the younger generation there are groups with low english skills, I feel like we'd need statistics on it to be sure.
I don't we're arguing or anything. Thanks for the conversation :)
I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.
Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.
And don't get me started on internet infrastructure... In an international comparison we certainly aren't leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.
I feel like having fax listed in a public institution is really not a great example of the general population, and especially not of the people that would use the fediverse. Besides that, just because you have a fax machine doesn't mean you can't be technical. My father has one and he knows his way about using tech stuff, for example.
Internet infrastructure is of course a decades old problem, but then again, you don't need highspeed Internet to post on the fediverse.
Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.
Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.
The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of "close friendship" between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.
Dont forget 4: Lemmy was created by a German (me)
Really? I didn't know that?! Super cool and thx for commenting! Do you have any more info on this (something I can read somewhere)?
Also... I don't know if I ever will have an opportunity like this again... I would love a feature like I had in RIF (Reddit is Fun), and that is to be able to collapse all child comments in the comment section! It removes a lot of clutter and you can then expand the child comments when you want more on that topic. I use Jebora for lemmy for reference.
Not sure what more you want to read, but Dessalines and me do AMAs once in a while where we answer all sorts of questions. You can find them in [email protected].
And I don't work on Jerboa, you have to open an issue for this if there isn't already.
Thank You (Or should I say Danke?).
Gern geschehen!
Your data isn't really more private on the fediverse, is it?
Everything you post is shared with myriad instances.
You might not end up just handing it to some large tech corp but you also give up any remnant of control over it.
It's more about people most people don't know who are here unless you tell them rather than you're data being secure. A different feeling then when posting with your real name and with all of you irl friends following you
I mean using your real name does not depend on the platform you're using but more on how you're using it.
Pretty sure the majority of reddit users do not post under their real name and you could use a pseudonym on facebook if you wanted to.
Zuckerberg isn't going to check your ID when you sign up.
It's not and its not really one of the reasons. A lot of us are on reddit as well and facebook used to be very popular. Our privacy concerns are a bit weird. On one hand we distrustef google street view so much that google gave up on the other we use our full names on facebook and have our last name on our door bells. I think the real reason so many of us are on reddit and the fediverse is just that we are 84 million people and enjoy it to talk in german where we can. More populous countries often either have less available internet or speak english natively or are more comfortable speaking english than us.
2.: the other way around, UK & US are too fast about adopting new privacy-violating tech, think too less about the why and how. With companies, less regulation too; yes, you have more startups. But some of you guys are slowly starting to notice the dystopia you've created.
3.: doesn't really apply, since lemmy is quite tech-centric and english is a required skill there.
2)True true.
While this is true for me(*) - partially, it's not a fear, it's a certainty that my data is not secure anywhere online - I would be positively surprised (but kind of doubt that) if younger people actually think consciously about their online privacy.
* never had myspace, deleted all my facebook posts, comments, contacts & then account in 2012 when they changed the terms & conditions to own everything you upload - and before then I had never used my real last name there
The biggest reason you missed, German communities have already been big on reddit, and quite a few germans were involved in the initial discussion to move to Lemmy or Kbin.
Very true. Lemme is reddit... Or how reddit was when it was good. They liked reddit then for the same reason I did and why I don't use it and why we are here.