Short summary (what we know from the 2023 census). Feel free to add an additional observations:
Total responses: 531 (about 8% of ~6,500 registered users at the time)
Age: the distribution peaks in the 30–39 bracket (author: “average age … a bit older than other social platforms”).
Gender: strong male skew — 441 identify as “Man”, 32 as “Woman”, 25 as “Non-binary” (plus a few others)
Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada
Education & employment: high education levels (e.g., 223 reported a Bachelor’s, 55 Master’s, 19 PhD) and ~70.8% employed full-time.
So your typical answer is coming from a fairly well educated mid 30’s Canadian guy. Huh.
You really gotta learn how Lemmy actually works. It’s not a centralized website like reddit, it’s a federated platform with many different instances. Since lemmy.ca is an instance set up specifically for Canada, it’s no surprise that it mostly has people from Canada on it. That’s in no way representative of Lemmy as a whole.
I was under the impression that lemmy and lemmy.ca were synonymous. And Canadian.
They are completely different servers with no relation to each other. Lemmy is primarily developed by @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml neither of whom are Canadian.
lemmy is the fediverse forum we are using.
lemmy.ca, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.zip, hexbear.net, sh.itjust.works and so on are the different servers. the servers seamlessly talk to eachother, which is why it looks like one big thing.
its sort of like email, where you have different providers to the same network so to speak. it’s for decentralization and hopefully avoid what happened to reddit and digg, and social media in general.