I am 46 and started my career in tech but now work in another industry. I think it’s people with inquisitive minds rather than an age demographic. If there is something new and cool to check out in tech and it’s easy enough for busy people to understand I am all over it.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Fucking zoomers with their tiktoks and snapchats, what was so wrong with old school forums?
The Reddit migration was probably mostly people who know what an API is so that fits your demographic.
Also, people generally don’t take a stance on something unless it affects them personally. So API, privacy, data collection etc just doesn’t register.
The youth have an innate pressure to follow trends and their peers. They need and crave social acceptance while still lacking the means to be independent and "go their own way", so it's not viable to expect younger users to form the bulk of pioneering users of an unproven platform like the fediverse.
Older user will generally be more confident and independent, especially when the craving for social approval is not as powerful as it was in younger users.
heh
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 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.
100% this
I’m a tech nerd and software engineer and even I struggled to figure out how to signup. Most people I know just want something that works. And those things tend to be centralized because of ease of use. The Fediverse isn’t easy to use, and makes the user make major decisions before even signing up or understanding the tech.
Eventually there should probably be account migration and a somewhat “central” account management instance that most users are on, with the option to migrate their user to other instances.
A central account instance rather defeats the point of a federated system.
With federation it's ensured that any single instance is only a small part of the whole, and that if any instance goes down (or worse, goes rogue and becomes a bad actor) then the impact of that is minimised. All users being registered on a single instance is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket.
I do totally understand from the perspective of new users that it's hard to understand what to do or how to do it but that is a problem that could be better addressed with clearer onboarding. e.g "Choose any one of these recommended instances to sign up. It doesn't matter which - you'll be able to see the same content and communities across all of Lemmy no matter which you pick"*
*mostly, but close enough
● under 30
● i mean im getting there in terms of tech interests
● Yeah ok i use linux
Oh c'mon, 30s is not older.
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/LemmyMigration/comments/145epgc/looking_for_a_lemmy_website_try_lemmyworld/
Good. I don't want to see some teenagers doing some dumb dance or whatever is on normie platforms.
What do people have against dancing? Life is soul sucking enough - let people do their silly little dances without judgement.
Oh I have nothing against it at all, I just have no interest in watching them lol
Well it's new open source tech that can be self hosted by the 30+ tech nerds that have the money and interest in it.
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.
I think younger people don't give a shit about privacy because they grew up in a post 9/11 surveillance world. Facebook, Instagram and the internet at large became a giant surveillance machine and they've never known another possibility, so it's normalized to them.
Noooooo.
Well.. I'm 36 yo physician, an orthopedic surgeon resident. But I do LOVE tech&gaming. I want to switch from reddit because my favorite app boost stopped working and the creator is developing a boost app for lemmy. Oh and the official reddit app is just shit. I do hope lemmy will get bigger.
Oh wow, it's great to hear from a fellow healthcare professional!
I'm a 5th year med student who switched to using lemmy once my favourite app, sync for reddit stopped working :(
I'm a huge tech nerd too and while I do love the culture here, I find myself occasionally wondering if there are any communities on lemmy focused on medicine and/or medical professionals.
Would you happen to know any that you could recommend?
Not that I know of, maybe you can open one 😉
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.
We're the generation that learned to troubleshoot bc we had to. If we wanted to play that shiny new game or app, we had to actually get it running first.
I think about this a lot. I'm so grateful I had the experience of messing with the windows registry and other phenomena of the 90s.
TBH, I actually thought he was talking about autoexec.bat and EMS memory, etc, rather than windows. I guess I'm slightly older? Maybe not. I'm also thinking windows registry thing hasn't really gone away. Yet.
30 is old now? Dafuq
C'mon........16 is old now. Once you hit senior in high school, it's all downhill from there.
I spent most of my time on Reddit in the learn programming subs, so I'm glad at least that demographic has moved here. I'm almost 34, don't work in tech but want to, don't use Linux but want to (and if the rumors of windows adding ads to the OS are true I will switch to Linux full time except for gaming). I wasn't really that invested in the reddit API changes but I liked reddit when it was more under ground and wild west. I used to spend a lot of time on rcsources (those days are behind me regardless, though). So I wanted to see if there was still room on the internet for the outlaw tech cowboy shtick, and Lemmy stepped up to the plate.
Linux is good for gaming these days. It took a corporate push from Valve to do it, but things have improved.