1981
submitted 1 year ago by gamer@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:

  • ~30 years old or older

  • tech enthusiasts/workers

  • 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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] WaltJRimmer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

My biggest concern certainly isn't age groups. My biggest concern is interest groups. The initial influx from the Reddit protests created a lot of communities that will definitely become ghost towns. And there's going to need to be a process to clean that up eventually. The interests that are here right now are good for keeping the people already here. What's going to be interesting to watch is if broader appeal topics will start to grow or not. As I said, I expect a lot of die-off actually in the early days as people try out the Fediverse but then go back to what they were already used to.

Reddit had a lot of help from being a private company when they were growing. Anyone familiar with Reddit's history will know that it got propped up in part, eventually, by really high-quality celebrity events like the AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) coordinated with big names in multiple fields, though most popularly film and television. I worry that the Fediverse, as a decentralized entity, will never have something like that. Producers, movie marketers, agents, people like that are far less likely to take a call from someone running a Lemmy instance than they were from an outreach officer of a private company that had some weight behind it. Now, that's not the only way to grow, but... Damn it helps.

this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
1981 points (95.0% liked)

Fediverse

28252 readers
500 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS