• @[email protected]English
      20•10 months ago

      Anyone from Germany care to comment on why this is? Y’all seem to have such a large presence on here compared to others

      • @[email protected]
        41•10 months ago

        I’m from another nation-oriented instance that has an outsized presence, right next to Duitsland.

        My guess is:

        • Germany is a big, populated country
        • People from DACH also gravitate towards feddit.de
        • The culture kinda gives itself to the project
        • The NL and the EU are the main funders of Lemmy
        • The government itself is embracing the Fediverse
          • @[email protected]
            26•10 months ago

            German-speaking countries in Europe. Deutschland (Germany), Austria and of course the Confœderatio Helvetica (Switzerland).

          • Skua
            9•10 months ago

            It’s the country codes for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Deutschland for the D, Confederation Helvetica for the CH). Those are the three countries with a majority of their people speaking German other than Liechtenstein, which is extremely small

            • @[email protected]
              5•10 months ago

              It also means roof and is reminiscent of Dachsprache. One of those unreasonably neat acronyms.

              And in particular it’s the vehicle registration codes, ISO 3166 for Austria is AT (hence also the TLD).

        • @[email protected]English
          14•10 months ago

          I think one reason is the large number of German users on the Internet. With around 100 million speakers, German is the second most spoken native language in the West after English.

          According to the application texts, many users seem to come from various podcasts. We are also “endorsed” by one of the largest German-language subreddits on its front page (r/ich_iel). Our users have also started to watermark their memes, which occasionally attracts new users. Feddit also made it into an article in a popular IT magazine (heise).

      • @[email protected]
        9•10 months ago

        Generally internet culture In the Dach region is very active and forward looking, and potentially ideologically aligned with the idea of Fediverse and generally FOSS software and privacy. E.g. for Wikipedia language share German got overtaken by Spanish only within the last 5 years slipping from 2nd to 3rd suggesting some early adopter and internet participation higher than the norm.

        Subjectively a lot of people here have uneasiness with big tech, and are relatively informed about alternatives.DACH on Reddit was also very big, and very ideologically opposed to API changes and general Reddit corpo behaviour. Subjectively again Dach and ich_iel felt like home when I joined, essentially like the Reddit culture I was used to, just with a little more progressive views across the board.

        Also I suspect that German language speakers are fairly active within the English speaking parts of the internet in general, while Spanish and French as well as other non Germanic languages seem to have more disdain for English language content and sites, Germans and Dutch as well as Nordics are very comfortable with English as a common language.