Nothing against Germans, I’m just wondering why, outside of the English internet, it got such high adoption in Germany compared to eg. France or Spain. I see next to no French/Spanish/etc. content on here in comparison
The impression I have is that Germans are bigger users of the Fediverse in general than other countries, as in statistically overrepresented. Mastodon is originally a German project. Germans also created a Fediverse application for buying and selling second-hand items, Flohmarkt (Flea Market). Some other posts here have mentioned that Germans are culturally/historically more interested in privacy than many others, which may help explain the interest in the Fediverse. Finally, Lemmy is also an European project, so it makes sense that there would be more Europeans here, and Germany is the largest European economy and the most populous Western-European nation. Those are all probably factors contributing to this.
Other countries would have the courtesy to write in English.
Even the FrenchMost of us speak pretty good English and German media absolutely sucks ass, so many people choose to exclusively hang out in English-speaking spheres i guess
luckily many Germans learn some English at school, also the languages seem really closely related.
Wym? There are nein Germans here! Any more than nine would be a lot tho /joking
Ps, while not born in Spain, we’re in Spain!! Hello spain mentioned!! :D
I would guess because simply historically, we always were very private people. This was generally increased with the experiences during the second world war and after in East Germany, where there was widespread government spying and people spying on each other. Thus, we have lots of groups that are engaged with activism regarding privacy, and it’s present in the collective consciousness.
Reddit is an advertising shithole and Lemmy is the more private/free alternative, so it’s more likely more Germans come here.
Also in general, the internet lends itself for less social people, which I’d also characterize Germans to have a tendency for.
we always were very private people
I lived in germany for a while and I loved this aspect from germans. It really bothers me when people are like “what do you need privacy for, what are you hiding” like the government always has the best intentions
I have heard the same sentiment about privacy, and from what I’ve seen in privacy tool communities (e.g. meshnets, where the densest networks I saw in the world were Germany and Catalonia, or Tor network where it’s common to find German nodes) this matches up.
Germans invented the printing press. They seem always at the front of decentralized media distribution technology lol.
*took credit for inventing the printing press ;-)
They were the first to scale printing to mass producing the bible … and introducing mass literacy in their country.
We have nothing elese do do because we never work and have to much money.
Ah of course! What illness are you off becaause of today?
Like all germans we never work. What Merz said is true.
because we never work
so this is what Merz was complaining about? 😂
He still is. Lazy germans. Merz just hates us.
du bist Beamter?
Das wäre schön.
Germans were more vassalized post-WW2 and have therefore a higher adoption of english than e.g, the french. Another consequence of the marshal plan is that yankee’s wanted Germany as a consumer market and hence german culture is more closely tied to yankee culture than other countries, a lot of our shows, books, movies, music etc. are translations from english or not even translated in some cases. So there is more in common to talk about. Add to that there are a lot more germans than finns or dutch and I think it makes sense that german is the most endemic non-english language on lemmy.
I want to know what the Spanish and French speaking internet users do instead. I’m Swedish and we definitely have a big presence on Reddit (and probably fediverse) relative to our population. So looks like another North vs South difference.
Same – where are they all? Probably in their pasticcerias drinking coffee and enjoying the sun (jealous!)
For the same reasons there are a lot of Nazi Americans on the Nazi owned Twitter.
Care to elaborate?
How many germans do you need to change a lightbulb?
One. We are efficient and have no humour.
And always on the wrong side of history
One to change it and seven to file the paperwork.
Not true.
!Actually we will automate it!< :)
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
comparison
Lol.
Using Sync for Lemmy as my client.
So who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Dunno why the fediverse seemingly couldnt standardize on a certain markdown flavor.
Edit:
PS: Yours doesnt work on my client:
one 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!
May I ask whats broken for you?
It’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.
What do you mean, Germans are “online more than americans”?
The 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.
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…
60 millions Italian also.
As a neighbour (and disliker) of that country I can’t tell you how many German tourists I’ve seen immediately speaking germ and just assuming everyone needs to understand.
Probably why they are the only ones posting in their language herethen you would also have to include the Austrians and our Brothers in Cheese 😏
I’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.
(Edit: Just look through the used cars here, most if not all will have their plates censored given they have plates on them lol)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?
Most 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.
Half of Google streetview is blurred here
I think it took us 4 or 5 years of frog boiling until street view cars were allowed here (and only once google made it possible to have your home be censored)
Hmm I don’t know actually, but now I’m curious too. From 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.
https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/coronavirus-germany-privacy/
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 USSR 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.
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?
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.
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.
They’ll tell you before you can ask
Yeah, occasionally. Honestly that’s fine, the annoying thing is when they assume everyone else is, too.
Wasn’t also /r/ich_iel a big part of the reddit exodus at one point?
Their reddit automod promots Lemmy on every post iirc
Shout out to dach und ich_iel for keeping me very confused and slightly glad I took German in highschool!
Germans 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.
let me introduce the Dutch to you … Every corner of the world you’ll find a Dutch tourist.
Are they particularly globalised? Like more than France or Spain?
