Comparatively to the rest of the internet, it seems like there are a lot more Germans here. I’ve always assumed it was just because I was on a German instance and was in a sort of echo chamber (join feddit.org btw 🥳), but I just checked Fediverse Observer and it’s the 2nd largest country by users. Additionally, the German instances seem to be the biggest non-English ones.
Why is this?
For once, we are not the baddies
Germany has always been a big hub for Free software as a whole, for alternative communications, etc. The CCC’s presence is a big factor.
What’s CCC?
Thank you
More content than you ever could consume:
It’s from all their camps, workshops, Erfa’s (Erfahrungsaustauschkreis) and especially the annual Chaos Communication Congress which is huge and attracts the scene worldwide.
Most of the german ones get translated the weeks after the congress
Also Germany has one of the largest populations in europe, and they tend to speak English very well unlike France/Italy/Spain.
If Lemmy is mainly made of western countries with high proportions of anglophone speakers, the prevalence of German speakers isn’t really a suprise,
German subs were really big on Reddit, too.
Germany is the second largest country in Europe by population, they don’t really have their own social media like e.g. Russia or China and they’re much better at English than most other big countries that are not already English native speakers.
better at English It’s been a while since you’ve been in a video conference with Germans speaking English, hasn’t it? /j
Gotta use two newlines with Lemmy’s markdown, else it ignores it and then your comment comes out lookin a lil goofy
But with a second newline it’s fine
Or in other words: Use paragraphs.
Line-breaks are ignored. (Unless you use backslash or double spaces at the end - which in this case would still not break off of being a quote).
Thx, in theory know I have to do that, but whenever I type an actual comment I always forget.
I write in markdown literally every day and I still have to edit my comments at least three times whenever I do anything other than a line break. It be like that lol
i edit my comments 3-5 times after posting them because i keep adding info and correcting statements and drafting what i’m thinking lol. the first reply is literally just a “save draft” button for me. like i actually have to pay attention to how recently the parent comment was written to gauge how likely it is they’ll read my reply before it’s done. i have issues
EDIT: im not editing this one
My pronounciation is awful, too, but that doesn’t matter on lemmy!
And I’m still convinced that an English-language video conference with Germans is usually going to be better than with French people.
Fair, the French will just curse at you in French and look angry.
Then they set their desk on fire and go on strike for the rest of the day.
Considering the types of professions who usually have video conferences, that’s probably a net positive for society anyway.
The Seamstresses’ Guild of Ankh Morpork does not look favorably upon your judgement of their recent endeavors into digitalization and working from home.
To be clear, native Germans are far better at English than most Americans are at this point.
To be clear, native Germans are far better at English than most Americans are at this point.
honestly from a linguistic perspective this is so painfully inaccurate. you’re talking about native speakers here. what you might mean to say is that Germans use English closer to how the Brits use it. that is a defensible statement. but you’re doing something different.
just because native speakers change how they use their own language, they aren’t doing it “worse”. they are adapting their tongue to their needs. one’s mother language is deeply tied to identity, and cultural identities grow and shift through time. to say that their identity is “worse” is certainly a statement you could make, but you see the violence inherent in it, right?
who knows, there’s plenty of criticisms to make of Americans. i probably have more than the average. but i’m not really comfortable with putting down entire groups of people based on how they use their mother tongue. and i’m certainly not going to try to pass off criticism of a culture as a statement of measurement like “you are bad at X”
For another example, there is an exact inverse in America. “Texas German” is much closer to how German was spoken around the time of German unification. Same with Quebec to French.
Depends on the age group imo.
I think the people who experienced internet from ca. 2005-2015 will have the best English on average. Because in this time English was simply necessary to get a grip on a lot of media, games, websites… Now a lot of things are translated, sometimes by force (youtube, reddit…) and with bad auto-translation. Also German content creators became much more widespread since 2015, so now people might never need to look past their language horizon.
Of course the dates and statements aren’t absolutes, just general observations.
For context, I was on the internet before the Web was invented.
I’ve only ever spoken to highly intellectual Germans who spoke perfect English, but I’ve spoken to thousands if not more than a million of the most concavebrain moronic Americans imaginable.
lol, spoken like somebody who has never actually tried to speak English in Germany. As a shameful monoglot, I have had occasion to test the limits of English understanding in a variety of countries, and Germany has pretty low rates of English speakers in my personal experience. The Netherlands on the other hand…
This is true. But the general rule of thumb is that the farther you are away from a big city, the worse the understanding of English will get.
Try speaking English in a rural Dutch town and you will get hilariously broken English. There’s a famous book about it - Make that the cat wise. Full of literal translations that make 0 sense.
I concur, in my early mmorpg days (EQ) I thought many people playing (US EQ) were non US citizens because their English was very bad. It turned out I was wrong and the skill level was just (oftentimes) far worse than I expected.
Of course not in general, but not rarely either.
I mean, many Germans might read and write English well, but their pronounciaton …
Ship captain on the radio: “Mayday, mayday. We are sinking!”
German coast guard: “What are you sinkin about?”
Jokes aside, honestly, I have not hear much bad English here in Germany. Then again, I guess I don’t hear many people speak.
Great answer! Presence on reddit leads to presence on lemmy. Why present on reddit: linguistic proximity, population size, type of social media access
It happens, things become more popular in some countries than others ,and Germany has 80+ million people so it’s not that small.
What I’m more surprised with is almost no content in Spanish, either from Spain or Latin America, just because of the number of speakers. I mean Hindi and Chinese are spoken by more people, but they tend to have their own software ecosystems.
Indeed, there’s https://feddit.cl/ and https://mujico.org/ but that’s pretty much it
I guess the question is, what are Spanish speakers using for social media
They’re quite active on Reddit. It seems that the Fediverse didn’t resonate as much as with English speaking Redditors.
Have we told them about it in Spanish?
Lots of Spanish speakers also speak some English but also lots of them don’t. Some outreach in different languages might be a good idea.
Tengo naranjas grandes para el oso y dos gardenias para ti.
Soy gringo… Mi español no es bueno, pero no creo que eso sea correcto…
Spanish user here; I tend to avoid spanish speaking reddit, because they lean heavily towards neoliberal or the right in there.
So just like English-speaking Reddit, then.
As a kind of unique exception (!melbourne@aussie.zone being the other one), the mods of /r/ich_iel pointed out to feddit.de (previous version of feddit.org) in a pinned post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ich_iel/comments/14d65o7/öffentliche_dienstmeldung_änderung_der/
Compare this to all of the other country/regional subs who would remove similar posts for “self promotion”, and you get why the German population was guided here instead of having to hear it from an second level comment on a Sunday thread
That might be why Star Trek is so huge here. The largest Star Trek meme sub (/r/Risa) has also had a pinned post pointing to Lemmy since during the Reddit API migration.
Formerly largest, it got replaced and dethroned by /c/tenforward
Tho the r/de mods have this exact problem in recent times.
Oh, I’m sure the /r/Canada, /r/France and all of the others are the same.
The /R/buyfromEU mods still haven’t added any link to the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk in their pinned post
Mastodon was made by a german. I think that made the concept of the fediverse popular to germans.
We germans also seem to have a thing for non central organisation in anything
Germany is also 2nd for self hosters, after US. According to a self hosting survey.
Can you link me to that survey? I’d like to share that with a friend if you would be so kind.
Of course!
https://selfh.st/survey/2024-results/
It is a great self hosting resource: https://selfh.st/
Gotta say, I love reading the German memes in /all, even if I have a kindergarten-level understanding of German.
a kindergarten-level understanding of German.
I love the serendipitous use of kindergarten, with it being of German origin :)
No idea WTF is happening on ich iel half the time but it seems hilarious.
Neither have I, and I’m German. But that’s part of why it’s so appealing
Zangendeutsch is killing me though. I’m a native English speaker living in Germany and it’s difficult not to internalize fake internet German
Was heißt denn hier fake?!
I don’t speak or read German but every once in a while a meme will have a critical mass of words I understand because of their proximity to English, and the German 100% amplifies the meme.
In my experience, the mental effort spent trying to understand the German in a meme makes the comedic payout better
I fully agree, lol. I browse ich_iel with reading glasses and a dictionary
Because they’re Ger-many?
Take your upvote and fuck off. >:V
It’s more efficient to gather in one place
deleted by creator
Ah, there it is: the one joke Americans are able to make when talking about Germany.
Thanks for fulfilling the quota, I was worried Nazis won’t be mentioned once. Thank you for your service 🫡
One factor is German history with Stasi und ww2 fascism. We like increased independence and privacy, so lemmy rather than Facebook
And Signal is more popular there also I think?
I think so, and Threema, too.
Now tell your car manufacturers that people would like privacy, not always-online cars.
Not that the others are any better, of course.
Always online cars are mandated by EU regulations, and for a very good reason: automated emergency calls including GPS coordinates in case of crashes.
Other nice benefits include regular map updates.
That said, there is a lot of garbage being attached to the online functionality nowadays. And the way data is collected and handled in the background it at least partially atrocious, so let’s attack that instead of the proverbial baby in the bathwater.
I don’t mind the availability of online features. I loved being able to lock and unlock my car from the app, and getting a reminder that it’s unlocked - I HATE auto-locking cars, but since my Benz sent reminders, it never needed auto-locking. I wish it had remote start for winter, but that’s technically illegal in the EU I believe, will just need Webasto next time. I’m pretty sure the same model (W205 facelift) had remote start in the US.
I also loved that if I didn’t remember how much fuel I had left in the tank, I could just check it in the app so I’d know if I needed to plan for a fuel stop before driving somewhere (usually not, it was a diesel so 1200+ km range on the highway and probably 800 in the city).
I wouldn’t EVEN mind the automatic emergency call sending GPS coordinates. But the active sending of my location and other data at all times, without the ability to opt out of any types of data, is what I hate about new cars. It’d be possible to just store location on the car and send it with the emergency call, or send when the owner sends an API request via the app, etc.
AS if Germans bought the cars… Ask VW how well the do nationally…
When we were doing the reddit space stuff, Germany let us put a german instance on their train
Might’ve been feddit.org, don’t remember
They yearn for the German federation of the 1850s.
HRE will rise again !!!
Simple, we germans were the biggest non-English ones on reddit, too.
Funnily enough, AFAIK this is also reflected in the total webpages on the internet. There is an extraordinary amount of German webpages compared to other non-english ones.
And .de is also the third most used country code TLD. Only .cn and .tk are bigger. China is just so big and kind of has their own corner of the Internet, so that makes sense, and Tokelau is tiny but they offered free registrations to anyone for a long time.
Remember r/place ? Y’all were some colonizing mfers.
And we all learned that Osu players are a bunch of cheating whores.
No one fucks with the Germans on r/place
Its just a scam perpetrated by Big Germany. Don’t let it scare you
We tried Big Germany once, turns out it wasn’t too popular
Maybe then it will stick.
