SubArcticTundraWhy are there so many Germans on Lemmy?
notsosure
socsaGermans are everywhere. Basically everywhere you go as a tourist, it’s loud Americans and slightly less loud Germans using the Americans for cover to be lounder than they would normally be.
Are they particularly globalised? Like more than France or Spain?
davelI don’t know, but I think more Germans per capita are fluent in English than French, Spanish, or Latino people are, and maybe that has something to do with it.
Ah that would actually be quite a logical explanation, since being able to operate in English would make it easier for you to partake in Anglosphere trends
Anglosphere trends
conversely, it can be a godsend when you consider how broadly the global north has been adopting fascism.
Nah that affects all countries regardless of English. Just look at Hungary
SkunkWe (French speaking peoples) have several instances, the one I’m writing from is probably the most active on lemmy, the others are on piefed.
I’d say it’s probably because of your language settings or because of those German instance settings.
I had to block several of their communities as I don’t have German selected in my languages but they still show on all (and in German, not English posts hosted on a German instance), so they are just badly setup.
Interesting point..
Maybe we should all have Spring Cleanup, where we get our instances to be configured to better settings, to keep tuning-up the fediverse?
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MentalEdgeIt’s pretty much just that there are a lot of Germans.
The population of Germany is about 80 million.
All else being equal, there are 16 times more Germans online than us finns, for example.
Next to the USs 300 million people, that’s still one German about every 5 people. Add to that that Germans are definitely online more than americans, and yeah…
A lot of Germans.
Yeah, I haven’t noticed an unusual amount. Lemmy is still mostly Americans, and then maybe Brits and Germans. Just anyone that can speak English and has had broadband long enough to acclimatise to nerd culture, basically.
Lemmy mostly Americans
How can we even, like, know that?
The amount of American politics and culture on here for a start
To be fair the amount of absolute insanity coming out of the US is what’s driving it. Luckily the UK has been fairly stable recently.
AppoxoYeah, occasionally. Honestly that’s fine, the annoying thing is when they assume everyone else is, too.
I don’t have hard data, but it seems self-evident just from my personal experience. And going back to the original point, it’s a nation of 400 million.
Ok, but if you consider that there are 80M Germans, there are also 60M French (+African countries), and 50M Spanish (+ LatAm). That would make for a language ratio of ~1:1:1 considering Europe alone. This clearly doesn’t seem to be the case, so I’m just curious what the reason behind the strong adoption in German speaking countries could be…
cageythreeI’m probably quite biased being German myself, but I feel like that things like privacy and security tend to be more important to Germans than to other folks. And I don’t speak just about the tech bubble, it shows everywhere.
To give a random example, when a license plate has been blurred in a photo posted anywhere, chances are high it’s been posted by a German. Despite the fact that there is no license plate lookup (like carfax for US, finnik.nl for Netherlands, car.info for Sweden etc) so a license plate wouldn’t even reveal anything to anyone, yet we treat it like a secret on instinct. If you ask such a German why he blurred it, he probably won’t have a reasonable response, he just does it because he feels like it.
Getting back to topic, this might not be the only explanation, but I’m pretty sure it’s a noticable factor why Germans are especially present on platforms like this, i.e. platforms that tend to respect the user’s privacy more than the big tech corporations.
Hmm that’s fascinating. I didn’t realize you guys had such a strong cultural tendency towards privacy. Do you think there’s a specific thing that caused it, or has it always been this way?
Hmm I don’t know actually. From a quick search
As the newspaper Handelsblatt explains, “angst about potential surveillance is rooted in Germany’s past.” The combined legacy of the Nazi Gestapo and the East German Stasi are thought to be part of the reason Germany has been a pioneer in data protection — with legislation dating back to the 1970’s.
Interesting, although seeing as being sensitive about privacy isn’t as big in other post communist countries (at least not here in Czechia), I assume it must just be a generic cultural trait
Well the German Democratic Republic is unique among the former UDSSR countries in that it was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany. The latter already had a strong focus on privacy laws resulting from the Nazi time (meaning there was strong mistrust towards the state, but Nazis trying to hide in plain sight was obviously also relevant). But when the sheer amount of information the communist intelligence services were storing on their citizens became known after reunification this pre-existing privacy bias was put into overdrive, it confirmed all the worst fears west Germans already had about the state becoming too powerful.
LileathMost of this privacy fetish is purely performative though. The Schufa is a dystopian data collector with information on every German and despite a token focus on data privacy politicians pass more and more surveillance laws like using Palantir for the police and crackdowns on free speech and protesting in general.
Zahtu
bonenodeThe USs social media user count is at 73% of population, to Germany’s 77%. Smaller difference that I expected, but I did remember correctly, that the US has lower penetration.
USA does have higher time spent online per person though.
Ive been wondering about that myself.
I think it was the same with reddit. Maybe these types of “forums” are just popular among Germans. But I also feel like on average Germans have a higher tendency towards english content than the rest of Europe. Especially France and eastern Europe are notoriously monolingual. I guess there are probably a lot of dutch or belgian people here (relatively speaking), but those countries are smaller so there arent many in absolute numbers.
I too think link aggregators like Lemmy, Reddit and HackerNews are very popular in Germany, but I don’t know why. The first time I noticed this was during the first two reddit r/place events, where users could compete to claim a pixel on a giant canvas to create pixel artworks. The German artworks were definitely the most prominent ones compared to countries of similar or larger size, by a loooong shot. Broader internet access and an high % of tech-literate population are surely a factor, but it definitely didn’t look proportional
e8CArkcAuLEHANS, GET ZE SPAMWERFER!
Also i think it’s because of germans having a bigger notion of data protection and that huge corporations are bad, which is why a lot more people are changing from reddit to fediverse. i can only compare it to spanish people, and i definitely see a lot more concern in german people.
another reason might be economic wealth, having the strongest currency next to the pound in the 80s and 90s, this could mean that early adoption of PCs and dial-up was more spread than in other European countries because of the relative cost difference of equipment. This early adoption could also mean that more people got to know the ‘old web’ and are more appreciative of non-standardised web content. it’s only hypothesises, i have no data to support it (yet)
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Internet-usage-in-Europe-2000-2007_tbl9_4891139
we can distinguish a few groups:
as we can see from the statistics, Germany is sporting the biggest total amount of internet users relative to the other European countries.
another relevant aspect is the percentage of growth, and Germany has one of the lowest growth rate compared to other countries while having a high percentage of users, which implies an early adoption of internet users.
linear regression could probably be used to find the relation between wealth and internet usage.
the case of Portugal is really interesting though, as it’s a less wealthy country but sporting a high percentage of internet users. Maybe there was some government subsidies?
That is actually a very compelling explanation. Although I guess the data it is based on would be a bit less relevant considering they are from 19 years ago…
yeah, i looked for old data,because my whole point was the early adoption of internet usage which might translate into preferences of the old web and by extension to the fediverse
After the 1974 revolution that overthrew Fascism Portugal had a couple of decades of being quite Leftwing during which it massivelly invested in Education, including tertiary education, so the generations now in their 50s and younger almost universally learned English language at a school and include a large proportion of people with higher degrees.
There was also a period in the 80s/90s with some investment in adult education and that coincided with the fast growth of personal computing around here.
Then add to that that fixed Internet is quite cheap (a TV + unlimited 200Mb fibre + fixed phone line monthly packets costs around €45 and recently some even cheaper and faster providers have entered the local market, so for example I pay €15/month for 1 Gbps fibre) and almost universally fibre, possibly because unlike in countries like the UK the incumbent telecom operator in Portugal for whatever reason didn’t really manage to or tried to block the replacement of older internet access technologies with Fiber (I was living abroad at the time, so I don’t know for sure, but the period with maybe the only half-way decent non-crooked government - led by the guy who now heads the UN - kinda overlaps with the time with fixed Internet started spreading, so maybe they actually did some proper, Northern-Europe quality legislation around data access infrastructure which yielded a far more competitive market than you see in places like the UK).
I suspect some or all of these things explain why in this specific domain Portugal looks a lot more like smaller Northern European countries than it’s tradition of being a Chunk Of South-America in Europe would lead one to expect.
Welkom to ze cyberspeisss! 🤖
DavidDoesLemmyThe real question is why are there so many Americans here.
I mean have you look outside in america lately? No thanks.
AllNewTypeFaceIndeed, it is said that John Mastodon himself is German
zeppo
ordnance_qf_17_pounderDoes it make the French and Polish nervous?
Shout out to dach und ich_iel for keeping me very confused and slightly glad I took German in highschool!
HanrahanWasn’t also /r/ich_iel a big part of the reddit exodus at one point?
Alas Poor ErinaceusHerzlich willkommen! 🙂🇩🇪
(according to DeepL—hope I got this right!)
How many germans do you need to change a lightbulb?
One. We are efficient and have no humour.
off topic but i’ve never seen this tg-spoiler before, it’s much better than the normal click to dropdown one. looks good on piefed web ui but i clicked view original and it doesn’t work on your own instance
comparisonLol.
Using Sync for Lemmy as my client.
So who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dunno why the fediverse seemingly couldnt standardize on a certain markdown flavor.
Masterone of the last holdouts! More power to you! Its not been updated in almost a year now so its starting to fall apart as the api changes.
Nah, that thing was broken even in the beginning…
Problem is, that I used it for >4 years on reddit and since the first exodus and the announcement of the lemmy client I never was much in the mood to switch. And I like the interface, so theres even less reason to switch.
Oh well, am I right? :P
I had to switch to summit from sync during the last major lemmy update as it was breaking to many things. I miss it though. it was by far the best client (for me) and I hope dawson randomly appears with a patch that fixes everything… but his last post is over a year old and last major update much older lol.
If its still working for what you use it for good on you! im jealous!