It started as a German version of me_irl (hence the name "ich im echten Leben") and developed a culture on its own including bad translations from English and other insiders
Would it help to have mental illness? Cause if so, I'll dust off some of these old Rammstein CDs and meet you guys over there after I get more proficient.
To try and answer the question of why so many of them. Please note this is broad generalizations:
german people have large privacy and date security fears. This has kept them off of many other platforms. Most people in my friends circle never had a MySpace / Facebook... Being in an anonymous space like here is nice.
they also are and have been technologically behind in many ways. Bringing them slower to other platforms that they would have started off on, making it so they didn't use any. Ignorance and fear of technology and privacy fear combined with being technologically slower meant they were going on other platforms in a time when the platforms were getting known as "bad, mentally harmful, data mining & selling machines".
English language skills are lower in Germany (outside of Berlin). Many tourists don't see this as they go to touristy things (hotels, attractions) where they speak English. It is easy in platforms like this or reddit to be in a German speaking bubble. People who speak lots of English like their neighbors the Dutch, would more likely just post in English as everyone can then understand it.
While it's true that Germans might value their privacy more than others, the fediverse is incredibly niche and most people either use the big corpo apps or nothing. Also lemmy is not anonymous, at most maybe pseudonymous.
I really don't get point 2. Isn't being a member of the fediverse rather advanced? But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?
I'm Gen Z and almost all of my friends know English well enough to have a conversation online. Granted, I work in IT, but not all of my friends are technology people and this still holds.
Counterpoint: I think Germany is just a rather big Western country with many technologically interested people and people who value fediverse ideals like being free from corporate influence. There are dozens of us!
hey - PlexSheep - wrong phraseing maybe from me. I don't want to play semantics with how Anonymous is it is... But yeah, it is not 💯 anonymous so that is clearly too strong.
On here I have no friends, no connections, and my irl name is not attached to my account. So closer to anonymous than for example Facebook. It's harder for just any user to track down things about specific users.
lemmy is nich but not advanced nor hard to use. I like it because it's super simple. The point has nothing to do with Germans being able to use lemmy, but rather they did not start off using other programs or apps (z.B. MySpace Facebook) in the 90s and early 2000s as soon as other people like Americans. When these apps started they were great and had no negative feelings to them. When Germans came around to start using them in larger numbers, they already had negative issues. So they never started with these apps like others did in other countries. This is likely very different for you, as you are much younger. All of this stuff existed already when you were coming into adulthood.
sounds like you have a great friends group. I also have many experiences with German people who speak English very well... As well as many who can't. I have both English and German only speaking friends. I spoke nearly zero german when I came here. It's hard. Cashier at rewe, anyone working at Bauhaus, nearly anyone in the small town I was first in. Some cities aren't much better. Some of my employees speak zero functional English and they are young. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is a big difference in Germany and somewhere like Holland.
[...] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?
I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.
Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.
And don't get me started on internet infrastructure... In an international comparison we certainly aren't leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.
Really? I didn't know that?! Super cool and thx for commenting! Do you have any more info on this (something I can read somewhere)?
Also... I don't know if I ever will have an opportunity like this again... I would love a feature like I had in RIF (Reddit is Fun), and that is to be able to collapse all child comments in the comment section! It removes a lot of clutter and you can then expand the child comments when you want more on that topic. I use Jebora for lemmy for reference.
Your data isn't really more private on the fediverse, is it?
Everything you post is shared with myriad instances.
You might not end up just handing it to some large tech corp but you also give up any remnant of control over it.
It's more about people most people don't know who are here unless you tell them rather than you're data being secure. A different feeling then when posting with your real name and with all of you irl friends following you
It's not and its not really one of the reasons. A lot of us are on reddit as well and facebook used to be very popular. Our privacy concerns are a bit weird. On one hand we distrustef google street view so much that google gave up on the other we use our full names on facebook and have our last name on our door bells.
I think the real reason so many of us are on reddit and the fediverse is just that we are 84 million people and enjoy it to talk in german where we can.
More populous countries often either have less available internet or speak english natively or are more comfortable speaking english than us.
2.: the other way around, UK & US are too fast about adopting new privacy-violating tech, think too less about the why and how. With companies, less regulation too; yes, you have more startups. But some of you guys are slowly starting to notice the dystopia you've created.
3.: doesn't really apply, since lemmy is quite tech-centric and english is a required skill there.
german people have large privacy and date security fears. This has kept them off of many other platforms. Most people in my friends circle never had a MySpace / Facebook… Being in an anonymous space like here is nice.
While this is true for me(*) - partially, it's not a fear, it's a certainty that my data is not secure anywhere online - I would be positively surprised (but kind of doubt that) if younger people actually think consciously about their online privacy.
* never had myspace, deleted all my facebook posts, comments, contacts & then account in 2012 when they changed the terms & conditions to own everything you upload - and before then I had never used my real last name there
The biggest reason you missed, German communities have already been big on reddit, and quite a few germans were involved in the initial discussion to move to Lemmy or Kbin.
Very true. Lemme is reddit... Or how reddit was when it was good. They liked reddit then for the same reason I did and why I don't use it and why we are here.
The only settings i see are these, and if I navigate to my own profile I don't see any unique setting buttons.
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