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?
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.
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,
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.
The last congress was named 38C3: Illegal Instructions if you want to search on their media hub. A lot of the talks are in english.
Most of the german ones get translated the weeks after the congress
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.
To be clear, native Germans are far better at English than most Americans are at this point.
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.
better at English
It’s been a while since you’ve been in a video conference with Germans speaking English, hasn’t it? /j
EDIT: line break
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).
One factor is German history with Stasi und ww2 fascism. We like increased independence and privacy, so lemmy rather than Facebook
