A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
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.
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.
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...
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.
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, βangst about potential surveillance is rooted in Germanyβs past.β 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 β with legislation dating back to the 1970βs.
https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/coronavirus-germany-privacy/
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)
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.
then you would also have to include the Austrians and our Brothers in Cheese π
How many germans do you need to change a lightbulb?
One. We are efficient and have no humour.
One to change it and seven to file the paperwork.
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.
let me introduce the Dutch to you ... Every corner of the world you'll find a Dutch tourist.
Wasn't also /r/ich_iel a big part of the reddit exodus at one point?
Their reddit automod promots Lemmy on every post iirc
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
luckily many Germans learn some English at school, also the languages seem really closely related, easy to learn.
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.
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
Shout out to dach und ich_iel for keeping me very confused and slightly glad I took German in highschool!
I donβt 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.
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
We (French speaking peoples) have several instances, the one Iβm writing from is probably the most active on lemmy, the others are on piefed.
Iβd say if you see a lot of them itβs probably because of your language settings or because of those German instance settings.
I had to block several of their communities as I donβt 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 havenβt updated my blacklist in a while.
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?
_ /\ _
We have nothing elese do do because we never work and have to much money.Β
du bist Beamter?
Das wΓ€re schΓΆn.Β
because we never work
so this is what Merz was complaining about? π
HANS, GET ZE SPAMWERFER!
Also i think itβs 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 βold webβ and are more appreciative of non-standardised web content.
itβs only hypothesises, i have no data to support it (yet)
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:
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 itβs a less wealthy country but sporting a high percentage of internet users. Maybe there was some government subsidies?
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.
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.
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.
i for one welcome our new German overlords.
wait.. not that... :) but seriously 2 good german friends who are truly wonderful people.
Germans invented the printing press. They seem always at the front of decentralized media distribution technology lol.
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.
Other countries would have the courtesy to write in English.
Even the French
Wym? There are nein Germans here! Any more than nine would be a lot tho /joking
Ps, while not born in Spain, weβre in Spain!! Hello spain mentioned!! :D