Germans invented the printing press. They seem always at the front of decentralized media distribution technology lol.

Most of this privacy fetish is purely performative though. The Schufa is a dystopian data collector with information on every German and despite a token focus on data privacy politicians pass more and more surveillance laws like using Palantir for the police and crackdowns on free speech and protesting in general.

off topic but i've never seen this tg-spoiler before, it's much better than the normal click to dropdown one. looks good on piefed web ui but i clicked view original and it doesn't work on your own instance

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

Das wäre schön.

we always were very private people

I lived in germany for a while and I loved this aspect from germans. It really bothers me when people are like "what do you need privacy for, what are you hiding" like the government always has the best intentions

because we never work

so this is what Merz was complaining about?
😂

*took credit for inventing the printing press ;-)

luckily many Germans learn some English at school, also the languages seem really closely related, easy to learn.

They were the first to scale printing to mass producing the bible ... and introducing mass literacy in their country.

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.

He still is. Lazy germans. Merz just hates us.

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

Ah of course! What illness are you off becaause of today?

Like all germans we never work. What Merz said is true.

Yeah, occasionally. Honestly that's fine, the annoying thing is when they assume everyone else is, too.

I don't have hard data, but it seems self-evident just from my personal experience. And going back to the original point, it's a nation of 400 million.

For the same reasons there are a lot of Nazi Americans on the Nazi owned Twitter.

[Edit] Clearly I need to clarify. What I mean is that Germans are sensible people imo and they're not stupid to enough to use Twitter that is filled with arseholes and run by an arsehole.

Hence their high usage of Lemmy.

Other countries would have the courtesy to write in English.
Even the French

And always on the wrong side of history

60 millions Italian also.
As a neighbour (and disliker) of that country I can't tell you how many German tourists I've seen immediately speaking germ and just assuming everyone needs to understand.
Probably why they are the only ones posting in their language here

Care to elaborate?

Lol.
Using Sync for Lemmy as my client.
So who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dunno why the fediverse seemingly couldnt standardize on a certain markdown flavor.

Edit:
PS: Yours doesnt work on my client:

one of the last holdouts! More power to you! Its not been updated in almost a year now so its starting to fall apart as the api changes.

Nah, that thing was broken even in the beginning...
Problem is, that I used it for >4 years on reddit and since the first exodus and the announcement of the lemmy client I never was much in the mood to switch. And I like the interface, so theres even less reason to switch.

Oh well, am I right? :P

To be fair the amount of absolute insanity coming out of the US is what's driving it. Luckily the UK has been fairly stable recently.

Their reddit automod promots Lemmy on every post iirc

The USs social media user count is at 73% of population, to Germany's 77%. Smaller difference that I expected, but I did remember correctly, that the US has lower penetration.

USA does have higher time spent online per person though.

Well the German Democratic Republic is unique among the former USSR countries in that it was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany. The latter already had a strong focus on privacy laws resulting from the Nazi time (meaning there was strong mistrust towards the state, but Nazis trying to hide in plain sight was obviously also relevant). But when the sheer amount of information the communist intelligence services were storing on their citizens became known after reunification this pre-existing privacy bias was put into overdrive, it confirmed all the worst fears west Germans already had about the state becoming too powerful.

I had to switch to summit from sync during the last major lemmy update as it was breaking to many things. I miss it though. it was by far the best client (for me) and I hope dawson randomly appears with a patch that fixes everything... but his last post is over a year old and last major update much older lol.

If its still working for what you use it for good on you! im jealous!

May I ask whats broken for you?

A lot of picture dont work anymore only the thumbnails. Same for videos. Spoilers dont work as examples by this post. Sometimes I click a post and it shows the content but none of the comments load. Some of the other markdown language no longer works either.

The impression I have is that Germans are bigger users of the Fediverse in general than other countries, as in statistically overrepresented. Mastodon is originally a German project. Germans also created a Fediverse application for buying and selling second-hand items, Flohmarkt (Flea Market). Some other posts here have mentioned that Germans are culturally/historically more interested in privacy than many others, which may help explain the interest in the Fediverse. Finally, Lemmy is also an European project, so it makes sense that there would be more Europeans here, and Germany is the largest European economy and the most populous Western-European nation. Those are all probably factors contributing to this.

Same – where are they all? Probably in their pasticcerias drinking coffee and enjoying the sun (jealous!)

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.

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.