this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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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.
Source: my opinions - but I do live in Germany.
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.
It's not and its not really one of the reasons. A lot of us are on reddit as well and facebook used to be very popular. Our privacy concerns are a bit weird. On one hand we distrustef google street view so much that google gave up on the other we use our full names on facebook and have our last name on our door bells. I think the real reason so many of us are on reddit and the fediverse is just that we are 84 million people and enjoy it to talk in german where we can. More populous countries often either have less available internet or speak english natively or are more comfortable speaking english than us.