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 :)