I would say that resistance to learning new things is not necessarily generational. It might get harder the older you get, but if you’re a baby boomer and are extremely familiar with how smart phones work, then you had to learn that technology as an adult. Like, the original iphone came out in like 2008. The youngest baby boomer would have been in their late 40s when they got their first smartphones. You don’t get to say “old people don’t like learning new technology” and “boomers only know how to use things on the smartphone” at the same time, because the material evidence for that is explicitly contradictory.

Primates can use smartphones. We’ve made the format so user friendly we have other species which can meaningfully interact with it. You don’t really “learn” how to use a smartphone, the designs are just that good now. Apple holds 57% of the cell phone mobile market, and their UI is nearly perfect for usability.

I have no metrics around user age groups cross referenced with occupation for federated social media. But I’m pretty sure you don’t either, so I’m not sure where your confidence on that statement is coming from.

There is like 70 thousand accounts across all of the lemmy instances, I’m sure people have multiple at this point to deal with limited federation. We have no metrics because this is all brand new and no one is collecting metrics, heck we don’t know if anyone will even collect metrics, the whole thing could become a dead mall before someone gets around to it. My hypothesis, which is by definition just a hunch, is that we can make some pretty strong guesses on the demographic makeup of lemmy. I would suspect the makeup is predominantly center left people in the united states who likely work in tech of some fashion, aged 24 to 35, and the younger demographics are going to skew left/far left (lemmygrad) and LGBT (Blahaj/196). I obviously have no solid evidence of this, I’m just going off the activity levels of the various instances. The OP in this question was whether lemmy was actively hostile to conservative viewpoints, and my response to that was and still is there isn’t going to be much of a conservative slant for lemmy yet because they have no reason to be here yet they have other social media that is infinitely more active than any lemmy instance.

Okay…just to make sure we’re on the same page: you do understand that if 44% of something comes from one thing, then 56% must necessarily come from something that is NOT that thing, and 56 is a bigger number than 44, right? Like, this specific statement directly contradicts itself.

I’m not sure if you missed the context I was going for, or are purpoefully misconstruding it? Reddit was a tiny website in the overall scheme of internet traffic wasn’t it (this is actually a question, I’m pretty sure it was very small overall), the vast majority of the internet is browsed through mobile devices, reddit was an outlier. Twitter, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, facebook, all of them are browsed in the majority on mobile. The demographics skew even more towards mobile when you go world wide and not just the U.S. Mobile devices completely dominate the internet worldwide.

Your underlying statement was based in a foundational premise that conservatives were too old and/or stupid to figure out how to use Lemmy, therefore Lemmy was “naturally” insulated from conservative perspectives. And now you’re saying they won’t join Lemmy instances because they have better existing options.

Yes, because none of those conservative groups are a monolith, they’re a much of a “big tent” as the left is in a lot of ways. Hardcore fascists aren’t browsing tiktok, they’re in smaller cells that converse in IRCs and other very hard to find niche groups. Run of the mill conservatives are mostly on things like voat, facebook, truthsocial, the_donald, basic run of the mill shit. There’s a big difference between your average conservative genx father and someone who would be right at home on stormfront. Just like there’s a big difference between your average live/laugh/love suburban mom who has a left slant and wants people to be happy, and a hardcore leftist that would gleefully put a billionaires head under a guillotine. There’s nuance and niche group within niche groups within niche groups.

Also, remember dude we’re on a very small instance, this isn’t reddit, we’re likely going to get to know each other relatively well if we frequent the same instances and conversations, this isn’t reddit where we’re going to get lost in a sea of accounts. Things are small enough that we’ll probably recognize each other on other instances. Just like back in the day when forums and image boards were gaining big traction. Lemmy is where Reddit was 12 years ago, and where 4chan was 20 years ago.

Older people, millenial/genx/boomer don’t necessarily want to learn new stuff just because they have competency with the tools they were required to use at the time. You can probably count the number of GenX accountants in corporate america who have made a Lemmy account on a single hand. You can probably count the number of genx rural blue collar workers who have made a lemmy account on the other hand. I obviously don’t have any data to back this up, and we probably never will, but there simply isn’t enough users statitically in the lemmy sphere for it to be untrue. No one this early is going to be browsing lemmy without making an account, and making an account requires some level of commitment or effort beyond mindlessly scrolling.

App usage on cell phones is the preferred method of doing things across the entire world. Mobile usage accounted for 44% of reddit traffic, and that was with reddit being better on a desktop than on a mobile device. Tiktok is borderline unusable on a PC, facebook, insta, SC, twitter, all of them the majority of use is mobile, not desktops.

My point remains, it’s not that Lemmy is hostile to conservative viewpoints (although it is), it’s that the extreme majority of conservatives, be they middle of the road, rural, alt-right, neonazi, neoliberal, whatever flavor you want, have alternative options already established that they can congregate towards.

There’s probably a sizable group of younger individuals, talking like 14-18 that are your kinda weird kids who don’t have strong interpersonal social groups and instead compensate with the internet. The ones who find community in various instances are going to probably trend heavily left over time as they’re exposed, inadvertently, to things they wouldn’t normally be if they had more socionormative relationships.

No well adjusted 16 year old with a gaggle of friends is hanging out on sunday night in the summer on lemmy unless they have a very atypical social circle, autism, or both. And I don’t say autism in a derogatory way.

I was that kid back in 2004-2005 who had no social friend group and found connection with people through 4chan when I was 14. The exact same type of people who were attracted to chans way back when are the type of people that are going to be attracted to lemmy and federation. The only difference is this time the chans are already cemented and those who fall into the alt-right pipeline already have their destination mapped out for them. Those that aren’t sucked into the hateful rhetoric will likely find there way here as content seeps into the rest of the internet by osmosis.

Discord is extremely popular among well adjusted teen groups and social outcasts in equal order, it has strongly become “the third location” fpr a lot of people. Instead of hanging out at a skate park, or the mall, or in AIM chats, they’re hanging out in VC on Discord.

It basically has to skew older, probably 25 to 30+ The vast majority of those younger are going to be on tiktok, sc, insta, or something like discord. Lemmy will be considered more “left” overall than even reddit was. There will be of course bad instances, but i think pressure to defederate from them overall will be strong, especially when the “free speech” instances start having difficult legal questions thrown at them when their users inevitably start saying the quiet part out loud.

Tumblr i the only other real leftist space I think. You could maybe put baseline social media is somewhat leftist, tik tok, instagram, snapchat, most of those have a leftist lean, primarily because they trend younger. Your general use social media is going to have a left/right lean based on age demographics. That’s just the lean those general social medias are going to have.

They’re not going to have the numbers to get any traction. Honestly, the bulk of the vocal conservatives are older and a bit brain rotted at this point. They won’t want to learn or deal with something like Lemmy because it’s not as easily out of the box on their cell phone yet, because there’s not great app support. That demographic is almost exclusively mobile device users. Note; the above description is of your typical boomer esq white dude who you imagine taking a tik tok in his truck from a too low angle with wrap around shades on.

The actual alt-right and neonazis don’t need lemmy, because they weren’t really on reddit to begin with. The majority of them that are just on the surface of the alt-right are on 4chan, voat, and shit like that. Those that are a lot deeper are very tightly knit and on IRCs, telegram, onion networks; and are typically invite only or you need to know a guy who knows a guy kinda thing.

Conservatives have no need for Lemmy, they have their primary platforms still and can easily migrate. Reddit was basically all the leftist sphere had.

Don’t mistake me, I would much prefer to just hop on public transit and get to where I want without having to drive. Whenever I travel I take great pleasure in being able to use public transit that actually just “works” and not having to rent a car or drive my own car around

That being said, I think bicycles and “walkable” cities are the stupidest pursuit people who want to change the system pursue. It’s easy to make a bike lane to point to and go “see! progress!” when no one will end up using the bike lane with any real consistency because the city is still laid out like garbage and getting from one end of even a small city to the other by bicycle lane is frustrating at best and dangerous/suicidal at worst.

Honestly the fervor of which you’re shitting on outlook has convinced me that it probably is a lot worse than I realize in comparison.

Down with outlook!

Anyone who lives in the suburbs where doing lawn maintenance, tree trimming, and other such stuff is required due to HOAs and other such nonsense typically requires either owning a truck, or having a friend with a truck, because every now and then you have to pack it full of lawn crap and haul it off. I have to do yearly fire protection on my property, that includes cutting out bushes, trimming trees, and creating defensible space. Loading that into a van would be a pain in the ass, loading it into an SUV means I’m never getting the sap out of the carpet. Throwing it in the back of a pickup bed means I don’t even have to think about it.

I don’t own a pickup, but I have multiple friends with pickups, and you get into a beneficial “I’ll buy you a tank of diesel if I can borrow your truck for an afternoon” relationship. They get 100 bucks in fuel, I get my lawn crap taken care of.

For the United States, I agree mass Transit should be a much more prominent thing than it is, but suburbs and mass transit is difficult to deal with. 50% of the U.S. lives in suburbs, 20% of the U.S. lives in rural areas.

I couldn’t live where I live without a car, and we literally have no mass transit. My nearest tiny grocery store is 3 miles away. I’m not putting a family of 4 on bicycles to make a run to the store to buy groceries, loading it on a bicycle, then hauling it home.

Part of the issue of mass transit, cities, and cars, is if I’m in a suburb 5 miles from a proper urban area with access to amenities, and I have no mass transit to get there, I have to take my car. And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?

Mass transit actually has to become a realistic option for the 30% that live in a city before we even start to talk about mass transit for the other 70% of the U.S.

I mean… it’s not that bad. Missing important communications is a skill issue that doesn’t get solved by a different product.