The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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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?
After chatting to a few gen z, if I was to assume a characteristic of this generation, it’s that most seem to have completely given up, or not even started, the fight against the deterioration of online privacy, exposure to ads, and companies “rights” and/or ability to harvest personal data from them no matter what they want. It’s just part of life to them.
It’s just accepted, and whenever I’ve raised the issue with them, they’ll generally just reply with defeatist/pessimist/‘pragmatic’: “well, the alternative X, y and z apps/websites you’ve suggested likely all have hardware backdoors forcibly installed anyway”
So I think the willingness to fight, and picture a different way of having things, really is focused on those within millennial and gen-x age bands.
Edit: the point being, gen z therefore appear less likely to move away from existing structures, like Snapchat and Reddit, over increased ad promulgation, personal data harvesting, or bad company behaviour.
I can confirm. I only came here after Reddit fucked the app I was using. I switched from the official app to Boost years ago because I was tired of the official app being complete garbage, and I refuse to go back. I never really paid attention to the enshittification of Reddit up until they crossed that line, since it didn’t affect anything I was doing.
