To try and answer the question of why so many of them. Please note this is broad generalizations:
german people have large privacy and date security fears. This has kept them off of many other platforms. Most people in my friends circle never had a MySpace / Facebook… Being in an anonymous space like here is nice.
they also are and have been technologically behind in many ways. Bringing them slower to other platforms that they would have started off on, making it so they didn’t use any. Ignorance and fear of technology and privacy fear combined with being technologically slower meant they were going on other platforms in a time when the platforms were getting known as “bad, mentally harmful, data mining & selling machines”.
English language skills are lower in Germany (outside of Berlin). Many tourists don’t see this as they go to touristy things (hotels, attractions) where they speak English. It is easy in platforms like this or reddit to be in a German speaking bubble. People who speak lots of English like their neighbors the Dutch, would more likely just post in English as everyone can then understand it.
german people have large privacy and date security fears. This has kept them off of many other platforms. Most people in my friends circle never had a MySpace / Facebook… Being in an anonymous space like here is nice.
While this is true for me(*) - partially, it’s not a fear, it’s a certainty that my data is not secure anywhere online - I would be positively surprised (but kind of doubt that) if younger people actually think consciously about their online privacy.
never had myspace, deleted all my facebook posts, comments, contacts & then account in 2012 when they changed the terms & conditions to own everything you upload - and before then I had never used my real last name there
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!
2.: the other way around, UK & US are too fast about adopting new privacy-violating tech, think too less about the why and how. With companies, less regulation too; yes, you have more startups. But some of you guys are slowly starting to notice the dystopia you’ve created.
3.: doesn’t really apply, since lemmy is quite tech-centric and english is a required skill there.
Your data isn’t really more private on the fediverse, is it?
Everything you post is shared with myriad instances.
You might not end up just handing it to some large tech corp but you also give up any remnant of control over it.
Yes, and don’t forget to donate to be extra sure. Donate that little money you safe from your three sharing economy jobs (after you payed your rent to Blackstone) to the Democrats, so they can pay a consultant ghoul a six figure salary to think of a new way to market genocide denial.
I kinda got grandfathered into Youtube Music by using (and enjoying) Google Music, and since YT Premium was only like $2 more, I got it. I primarily use it for the music. The no-ads is just a bonus for me, I guess.
I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.
Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn’t signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.
Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that’s a good value for money for me.
“Absolute evil” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s YouTube/Google’s fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.
Google just made it really hard for creators to go anywhere else and created a monopoly of sorts.
Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing. What we would need is to revive the politicians that broke up rockefellers empire and tell them to do the same with apple, microsoft, google, meta, amazon and every tech „giant”.
No more providing every imaginable service under one company.
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