this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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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!
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.
Yeah I get it, it feels somewhat anonymous, but if you look, it's really not. I use my usual Internet Pseudonym and if you search for it you can probably find my personal website quickly. As a German, I've had to put an impression there even. Reminds me, maybe using my Pseudonym everywhere is something I should avoid, but then again, I've grown attached to it. I follow ich_iel on here and also read comments there. It's a small community and you just know the regulars after a while.
It's not hard to use if you already know it, but I feel were forgetting the majority of the population that is absolutely not well versed in technology. I occasionally listen to a podcast that addresses the social media trends of the week, and in many episodes they addressed the fediverse once. And it was only mastodon for them, they didn't even get the name right, and they didn't really get federation too. I feel like it's true that it's not hard to use, but it seems like it's still hard for the average person to get into the fediverse, presumingly caused by the network effect and the fact that corps can't milk us dry and take all our data. The decentralized nature makes it hard to grasp for "normies".
Yes I have great friends and love them very much. I don't have a lot of English only friends. Someone in my family is married to a man from England, and I got to know a few of his friends, it was all great. True that even in the younger generation there are groups with low english skills, I feel like we'd need statistics on it to be sure.
I don't we're arguing or anything. Thanks for the conversation :)
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.
I feel like having fax listed in a public institution is really not a great example of the general population, and especially not of the people that would use the fediverse. Besides that, just because you have a fax machine doesn't mean you can't be technical. My father has one and he knows his way about using tech stuff, for example.
Internet infrastructure is of course a decades old problem, but then again, you don't need highspeed Internet to post on the fediverse.
Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.
Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.
The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of "close friendship" between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.