Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?
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?
To answer your question, for the non-tech-savvy having to pick a server is, yes, too much of a leap. We are conditioned in the industrialized capitalist world against making decisions we don't understand.
If we want to market it, we could make a wizard that randomly designates a server from a set of cooperating servers. Include also reminders that a user can join multiple servers and each one has separate rules (say, regarding posting NSFW material even to appropriate communities.)
I just talked to a Redditor who was entirely unfamiliar with the recent changes at Reddit.
That's exactly this. It's not a conditioning from society though, it's that most people don't care about how computer works, they want it to work. People here are the same, it's just that computers are our area of expertise or a interest. People learn about the things they are interested in. The things they use, they only want them to work.
Agreed. I might be an information technology aficionado, but I couldn't care less about how my car works as long as it does its job, so it'd be a bit hypocritical of me to judge the person I pay to fix my car for not being knowledgeable about computers.