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?

  • SwingingTheLampEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It doesn’t have to be a seismic shift. Geocities and Angelfire (still around. BTW) were corporate, they needed to make money, and when the free web hosting somehow failed to make money, the corporate owners shut them down.

    The Fediverse is decentralized. It doesn’t have to get huge, or make a lot of money. It can carry on for as long as it has enough users to carry on. Heck, the biggest BBS that I used back in the day had 23 phone lines. Several hundred regular users, but only 23 could connect at a time. It even survived a few years into the Internet era.

    That is to say that Lemmings don’t have to ‘win’ some sort of imaginary competition by taking all of the users from the other site. People used and enjoyed those bygone systems while they lasted, and we can do the same.