Nothing against Germans, I’m just wondering why, outside of the English internet, it got such high adoption in Germany compared to eg. France or Spain. I see next to no French/Spanish/etc. content on here in comparison
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.
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, “angst about potential surveillance is rooted in Germany’s past.” 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 — with legislation dating back to the 1970’s.
https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/coronavirus-germany-privacy/
Interesting, although seeing as being sensitive about privacy isn’t as big in other post communist countries (at least not here in Czechia), I assume it must just be a generic cultural trait
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
Not true.
!Actually we will automate it!< :)
And always on the wrong side of history
I don’t 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
Anglosphere trends
conversely, it can be a godsend when you consider how broadly the global north has been adopting fascism.
Nah that affects all countries regardless of English. Just look at Hungary
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
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
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
The real question is why are there so many Americans here.
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 too think link aggregators like Lemmy, Reddit and HackerNews are very popular in Germany, but I don’t know why. The first time I noticed this was during the first two reddit r/place events, where users could compete to claim a pixel on a giant canvas to create pixel artworks. The German artworks were definitely the most prominent ones compared to countries of similar or larger size, by a loooong shot. Broader internet access and an high % of tech-literate population are surely a factor, but it definitely didn’t look proportional
i for one welcome our new German overlords.
wait… not that… :) but seriously 2 good german friends who are truly wonderful people.
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.
Not only in lemmy. They are all over the fediverse
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.
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
Herzlich willkommen! 🙂🇩🇪
(according to DeepL—hope I got this right!)
Coincidence probably, coincidence just seems to happen.
