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?
Well educated, tech savvy, but also socially awkward. The Venn diagram is almost a circle.
I read that in Henning Wehn’s accent.
Fun facts… Henning’s accent is weird even to us Germans. And almost nobody in Germany knows him.
Because they’re Ger-many?
Take your upvote and fuck off. >:V
Because Ger-many Carl!
Simple, we germans were the biggest non-English ones on reddit, too.
Remember r/place ? Y’all were some colonizing mfers.
No one fucks with the Germans on r/place
And we all learned that Osu players are a bunch of cheating whores.
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.
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
They were also prevalent on Reddit but they’re more sensitive to the enshitification that some other countries like the USA and France are more accustomed to, so more Germans made the leap than Americans.
A lot of the internet is USA and Europe, and more recently India, just in general. China, Russia, and North Korea all heavily restrict their internet access and normal people in those countries probably don’t use english-centric online communities anyways. I’m not sure why the adoption rate seems much lower in other places, perhaps they’re still developing.
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.
For once, we are not the baddies
They yearn for the German federation of the 1850s.
HRE will rise again !!!
No idea, but I love their here cus I realized I finally had a use for Gemini! Been using it to translate the memes 😅
I don’t translate their memes, I mostly ignore them. but sometimes there’s a meme that’s close enough to English that I can understand it and those are hilarious
Keine ahnung.
This social media seems to be primarily eurozone folks
They’re also heavy on Mastodon and the clone I use, Catodon.
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
I thought CCC stands for C. C. Catch :(
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
also i think there’s a window of time within which you can edit your comment and it wont notate the edit. so no need to explain it!
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).
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.
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Great answer! Presence on reddit leads to presence on lemmy. Why present on reddit: linguistic proximity, population size, type of social media access
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…
