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
We have nothing elese do do because we never work and have to much money.
du bist Beamter?
Das wäre schön.
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.
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.
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!)
We (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 if you see a lot of them 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 were just badly setup. Maybe it changed tho, I haven’t updated my blacklist in a while.
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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Coincidence probably, coincidence just seems to happen.
HANS, 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:
- relatively wealthy countries with high percentages of internet adoption but with a small population size which translates into relative small proportions (green)
- relatively less wealthy countries with lower percentages but with bigger population size which makes for bigger proportions (red)
- relatively wealthy countries with high percentages with a big population size which translates into big proportions (violet)
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?
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.
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.
i edited my post to reflect that, thanks for the feedback :)
Welkom to ze cyberspeisss! 🤖
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
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.
Belgian checking in!
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
For the same reasons there are a lot of Nazi Americans on the Nazi owned Twitter.
Care to elaborate?
Well: musk? His nazi salute? His nazi comments? Fits!
And that relates to Germans on Lemmy how exactly?
See edited comment above.
Thank you for the explanation. For some reason, your edit didn’t show up for me at first but now I can see it.
In my opinion there are still way too many people on X, Germans as well as others.
Most 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, easy to learn.
The real question is why are there so many Americans here.
I mean have you look outside in america lately? No thanks.
Not only in lemmy. They are all over the fediverse
Indeed, it is said that John Mastodon himself is German
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.
Are they particularly globalised? Like more than France or Spain?
let me introduce the Dutch to you … Every corner of the world you’ll find a Dutch tourist.
I think it’s more of a symptom of how narrow a view of the world you get from mainstream English language social media, even the view of other Western countries. Sites like Reddit are openly hostile to content in other languages since only English is allowed in the main subreddits and other languages are quarantined to dedicated language/country subreddits, while sites like Facebook/Twitter accept all languages but completely isolate different languages from each other to avoid the “bad UX” of seeing content in a language the user doesn’t know.
Shout out to dach und ich_iel for keeping me very confused and slightly glad I took German in highschool!
