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?

  • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
    272·
    4 days ago

    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.

  • Zahtu@feddit.org
    34·
    3 days ago

    I guess, because Most of us are needs and Love the Open source Community. In contrast to nerds of other countries, we are far more interested in talking and participating on that stuff. Just as examples see KDE, Codeberg…

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    205·
    4 days ago

    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.

      • Saleh@feddit.org
        26·
        3 days ago

        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.

      • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
        10·
        3 days ago

        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”

        • Yeather@lemmy.ca
          2·
          3 days ago

          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.

      • dxdydz@slrpnk.net
        11·
        3 days ago

        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…

        • Paper_Phrog@lemmy.world
          5·
          3 days ago

          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.

        • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
          19·
          3 days ago

          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.

      • Strider@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        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.

    • DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works
      14·
      3 days ago

      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

      • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
        16·
        3 days ago

        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

          • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
            4·
            3 days ago

            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

            • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
              2·
              3 days ago

              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

          • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
            1·
            3 days ago

            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!

        • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          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).

      • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
        13·
        3 days ago

        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.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
      2·
      3 days ago

      Great answer! Presence on reddit leads to presence on lemmy. Why present on reddit: linguistic proximity, population size, type of social media access

  • tischbier@feddit.orgEnglish
    78·
    3 days ago

    It’s because I’m specifically learning German and the universe shifted to my will. The universe created feddit.org to give me a clear path to achieve my goal of befriending Germans.

    This only happpened because me, Tischbier, decided to take an interest in Germany.

    You’re welcome.

    (Joking aside, I noticed on Reddit before I left and before I started to learn German, that ich_irl was hitting the front page a lot too. My family decided to learn German together probably in part because of how funny Germans are. I watch German YouTubers now too (Spacefrogs and Staiy). Germany is a pretty big country and I think them the top leader of the free world! I have enjoyed reading the actual Germans takes on this topic. Prost!)

    • varyingExpertise@feddit.orgEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      Ah, that explains why I was cast into this existence last week after chilling in the void for eons, which I was actually pretty fine with, but here we are now, toast crumbs, income tax and all that. Thanks I guess.

    • Zacryon@feddit.org
      10·
      3 days ago

      “top leader of the free world”

      Yeah. We are currently hating on foreigners real hard again and want to introduce storage of IP connections for three months for everyone without reason. We are so free, that you can’t even change your name without psychological assessment. Even then it’s up to the arbitrariness of the clerk. And even then you are tightly restricted in how you can change it. We enjoy such freedom, that you have to wait 6 months or longer for specialist medical care (if you are not dying right now). But we are free to pay using private insurance, which instantly levels us up to superior class citizens. Much less of a hassle then, if you can afford it. We are so free that you can easily sacrifice most of your money just to get a somewhat minimal amount of living space for rent. Well, to be fair, this depends on your income class.
      This is especially free, if you have difficulties climbing up the income class, because you can’t get the medical attention you need to fix some stuff. Then you are free to revel in your freedom while not getting forward in your free life.
      And don’t mind those pesky little migrants again, who are free to stay dumb, because we allow ourselves the freedom to not integrate and support them properly.
      You see, freedom in Germany is often just a question of personal wealth. If you’ve got enough money, you’ve got a lot more freedom.
      Our freedom is also reflected in the world press freedom index which has worsened in the past years from “good” to “satisfactory”. When we vote for a political party that represents our opinions and interests best, there is a chance that this vote will be canceled out in the final election results, if that party doesn’t get at least 5% of overall votes. Such votes go directly to waste. Isn’t that great freedom of political choice?
      Let’s talk about freedom of movement: If you’re not a superior class citizen (somewhat wealthy) good luck getting around without a car. Especially in rural areas. Pack a good book and plenty of water. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind close personal contact to various strangers on a daily basis, because our public transport infrastructure takes it’s time and is overloaded with freedom.
      Also our politicians are very free in what they can do and how they can treat us. One guy, a chancellor nonetheless, used his freedom of thought to forget everything about an extremely severe financial scandal he was involved in (Cum-Ex, Scholz), another one enjoys his freedom after generously supporting a mask company using many many tax euros (during the Covid pandemic) based on a personal recommendation from party members (Maskenaffäre, Spahn), and then, politicians are also free to use the police as their personal intimidation tool when they have hurty hurt feelings after being called a dick (Andi ist 1 Pimmel). But I mean, that all makes sense. If we think of further cases like Nestlé-Klöckner, or Amthor-stocks, those people just want to ensure and expand their freedom.

      Ah… I could go on and on about it and tell you about the many facets of freedom we enjoy in Germany. But that’s enough for now. I need to get going to enjoy my freedom.

      Okay, to be even more fair, compared to the United States of Idiots, Germany is pretty cool. Also compared to a lot of other countries probably. But saying it is a “top leader of the free world” makes me scoff.

      • tischbier@feddit.orgEnglish
        6·
        3 days ago

        Haha I was kind of being a bit tongue in cheek and joking around about the state of the world. I’m sorry if it came off as super serious—I was making a goofy comment.

        The entire world feels like a matchstick—will it snap or set itself on fire?

        I do believe Germany is leading the world right now but that is not a great development. It’s actually a position that reinforces and exposes how fucked we all are. I also think that Germany’s leadership is incredibly tentative and fragile. Germany reminds me of America way too much in the worst ways.

        The state of German politics and the rise of authoritarianism in Germany is something I worry about, genuinely, daily. I follow your elections closely and your politics.

        This is the real reason I started learning German. Because I have no illusions that human decency will continue standing. Most of our shared suffering is because economically we are all being crushed by a few outrageously rich evil entities. We face this together.

        I do appreciate your perspective though and I am aware of what’s going on there with the Ausländer and systemic issues. It’s scary honestly and I’m sorry if my joking made it seem like I was making light of these issues—I never meant it to come across that way.

        As for the crisis with your cost of living, economic opportunity and especially securing affordable housing. I saw one German comedy video put it succinctly: Was wollen Die Parteien eigentlich machen mit meinen hohen Lebenshaltungskosten zu helfen?

        And the “answer“ from every Partie was: Also wir wollen dir helfen indem wir Ausländer abschieben!

        Actually, I’m a lawyer so I appreciate the detail you put in to explain because the Tägliche Nachrichten I can read doesn’t go into detail like you have—so thanks!

    • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
      2·
      2 days ago

      The universe created Feddit.org

      Actually Feddit.org is only a follow up instance. Originally there was an instance called Feddit.de, which was basically the same as Feddit.org. however, last year the only admin travelled to south-asia and went missing. To this day no one knows what happened to him. In his absence the pictrs box of the instance overflowed causing image uploads to not work anymore. As time goes on the instance started to get more and more unreliable. It started getting downtimes, federation didnt work anymore. After months of seeing the instance degrade the community started to take matters into the own hands and create a new instance. However it was clear, that there shouldn’t be a single admin in order to not have the same problem as before. After some time where we considered creating an own association to care for the instance we decided, to instead hit up the “Fediverse foundation” which are now hosting Feddit.org

    • sbf@feddit.orgOP
      8·
      3 days ago

      I’m learning German, too! I took 3 years in school and wanted to continue my education on my own. So far, it’s… going

      • tischbier@feddit.orgEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        Entschuldigung, was steht auf der Speisekarte? VERTIEFUNG DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHKENNTNISSE

  • Prime@lemmy.sdf.org
    99·
    4 days ago

    One factor is German history with Stasi und ww2 fascism. We like increased independence and privacy, so lemmy rather than Facebook

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      13·
      3 days ago

      Now tell your car manufacturers that people would like privacy, not always-online cars.

      Not that the others are any better, of course.

      • bob_lemon@feddit.org
        3·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • boonhet@lemm.ee
          2·
          3 days ago

          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.

  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    70·
    4 days ago

    Gotta say, I love reading the German memes in /all, even if I have a kindergarten-level understanding of German.

      • 0ops@lemm.ee
        5·
        3 days ago

        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.

    • 001Guy001@lemm.eeEnglish
      26·
      3 days ago

      a kindergarten-level understanding of German.

      I love the serendipitous use of kindergarten, with it being of German origin :)

    • Kacarott@aussie.zone
      21·
      3 days ago

      In my experience, the mental effort spent trying to understand the German in a meme makes the comedic payout better

      • sbf@feddit.orgOP
        6·
        3 days ago

        I fully agree, lol. I browse ich_iel with reading glasses and a dictionary