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

Coincidence probably, coincidence just seems to happen.

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.

I don’t know, but I think more Germans per capita are fluent in English than French, Spanish, or Latino people are, and maybe that has something to do with it.

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.

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.

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?

_ /\ _

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.

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.
in my personal experience, 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)

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

The real question is why are there so many Americans here.

Not only in lemmy. They are all over the fediverse

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.

Because there's lots of Germans?

this part is about the early adoption hypothesis, and relies on one (!) table about the internet usage in Europe from 2000 to 2007

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Internet-usage-in-Europe-2000-2007_tbl9_4891139

we can distinguish a few groups:

1. relatively wealthy countries with high percentages of internet adoption but with a small population size which translates into relative small proportions (green)
2. relatively less wealthy countries with lower percentages but with bigger population size which makes for bigger proportions (red)
3. 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?

Shout out to dach und ich_iel for keeping me very confused and slightly glad I took German in highschool!

i for one welcome our new German overlords.

wait.. not that... :) but seriously 2 good german friends who are truly wonderful people.

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...

Ah that would actually be quite a logical explanation, since being able to operate in English would make it easier for you to partake in Anglosphere trends

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...

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.

Indeed, it is said that John Mastodon himself is German

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 :)

Wasn't also /r/ich_iel a big part of the reddit exodus at one point?

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?

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/

Herzlich willkommen! 🙂🇩🇪

(according to DeepL—hope I got this right!)

Welkom to ze cyberspeisss! 🤖

I mean have you look outside in america lately? No thanks.

How many germans do you need to change a lightbulb?

One. We are efficient and have no humour.

Anglosphere trends

conversely, it can be a godsend when you consider how broadly the global north has been adopting fascism.

Lemmy mostly Americans

How can we even, like, know that?

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👉👈

Nah that affects all countries regardless of English. Just look at Hungary

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

The amount of American politics and culture on here for a start

Are they particularly globalised? Like more than France or Spain?

One to change it and seven to file the paperwork.

Not true.

!Actually we will automate it!< :)

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)

They'll tell you before you can ask

then you would also have to include the Austrians and our Brothers in Cheese 😏

We have nothing elese do do because we never work and have to much money.

let me introduce the Dutch to you ... Every corner of the world you'll find a Dutch tourist.

Belgian checking in!

du bist Beamter?

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.

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 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.