I am probably blowing the statistics way out, but I'm 71, a podcaster on three shows, no degree, no computer experience except personal, poor, living in a trailer, in Eastern Tennessee.

The median age seems to be much higher than other platforms if i had to guess its around 30-35. There are a good deal of tech people, Foss people and activists. There seems to be a balance of gender( based on nothing but vibes). Lots of lgbt people and communities.

There is a culture of creating art, technology and building spaces. There is a culture of inclusiveness and working together. Calling out bad behaviors in people, companies and governments.

Also cats and coffee.

I am only including the lemmy that is within my own federation. I am aware there is fringe communities of extremists and vile people but I've had very little interaction with them so I can't say how much of an impact they have on lemmy as a whole.

As a late gen x/"xennial" myself I've noticed there's proportionally more of us here than on other social media.

Tends to be left of centre even without factoring in the communistanarchistsocialist nexus, but also wider political range.

Tends to skew STEM.

Loves cats as much as the rest of the internet but proportionally loves FOSS more.

Strong rainbow presence.

People that miss forums

Here representing the suburban moms.

Think of it as the cool/bad kids’ table in the special-needs school cafeteria

More language diverse than Reddit, especially on language based instances. Shout out to the Germans who seem much more active than other languages (such as French or Spanish)

I'm here for shitposting, anime titties, and saying disproportionately cruel things about rich people.

I'm here to have a experience similar to reddit, without the negative load on my mental health.

We are Reddit before it became... Reddit.

That’s a good question. From what I gather, Lemmy (and most of the Fediverse) is an alternative to something, with less focus on the money/advertising. So I would guess most people are looking for an alternative way to connect about common interests. And because it’s not the easiest path for social media, I would guess most people have a desire for agency/self-reliance.

And because the whole Fediverse seems to be a different way of approaching social connecting, it takes a little more understanding of computer technology, so I would also guess most people have a least a higher than average affinity for computer technology. Linux and Programming Humor are larger communities.

That said, I have enjoyed a somewhat active participation about woodworking, gardening, jokes, news, medical updates, etc. Like mentioned in another comment, the different instances will have somewhat different norms and practices.

Female, old, non-techie but in the one fourth of people in my office who can set up a printer.

Nice try Mr. FBI

Different per instance, but generally, it feels to me like the conscience and reason from Reddit left the body on that day and moved in here at Lemmy. It hasn't gone back since.

Lemmy has an abnormally tech literate and FOSS "aware" (there's got to be a better term but I'm blanking) user base. The community is small enough that recognizing people isn't unheard of so we tend to be more polite overall - with a smaller community there's less of a sense of anonymity and more social accountability. Oh, we tend to be rather left leaning but, to be honest, "The universe has a well known liberal bias".

Other than those factors we're a mix of folks.

in my experience, Lemmy is 33.33% owls

well for me:

• just passed 50 last month
• been kicking around 'PCs' since the vic-20
• buun using linux since Mandrake Helios (6.1)
• have self hosted all sorts (including email for nearly 10 yrs, not any more other than a relay for my lemmy)
• had a mastodon instance for about 2-3 years - but use mastodon.nz
• spun up my instance of lemmy just as the exodus started
• been into tinkering with electronics from childhood

I guess that puts me in the the tech group that seems very common here

other groups that seem well represented are the 'left' and lgbqt+

Since lemmy is decentralized, the demographics are going to vary greatly depending on the instance. You’d have to create a pretty generalized poll and then post to most of the major instances to get anything close to even a general read.

I'm 51 and have been neck deep in tech since I can remember. On Linux since RedHat Halloween. The fediverse reminds me of the early days of the internet when it was all Usenet, IRC, GeoCities, etc.

About a month or so ago I was at a gay bar and saw a guy wearing a Debian tshirt. Him. Lemmy is people like that

I am early 40s in the accounting industry. Married, no kids, don’t want em. Have cats. Live in the Midwest, a lefty, woman, vegetarian that hates labels (heh heh).

Came to lemmy shortly before the Reddit API fuckaroo after seeing all the posts about the fediverse. Given that I had dropped all social media except Reddit in the prior 2 years due to a combo of crazy people, algorithms and targeted advertising, I was primed for fleeing. I’m tech savvy but not a tech nerd. Open source, Linux, self-hosting, etc all interest me but without having a direct background in tech, I find it difficult to prioritize learning more about it all.

If I wasn’t so entranced by other people’s thoughts and opinions in text form (never generally been a fan of videos/photos as an information medium), I would have cut all ties. This space can honestly be a little too “damn the man” for me, as I like rules and order, but I also feel the frustration of the public and tend to feel somewhat impotent about it. Hence, I think this is about the best fit I’ll find to still be able to connect with the thoughts of people I don’t know and experiences I don’t have.

I am a nonconformist American in my 40s. I'm a Florida native and middle school science teacher. I hate perpetually divisive culture and the corruption that drives it. I read mostly non-fiction, such as history and neuropsychology. I have little to no interest in computer tech, anime or video games. I left Reddit last year like many of you.

Would be cool to do a census.

There's lots of LGBTQ+ and FOSS (I wonder why lol). Star Trek and science are also becoming rather common (or it just took me a while to find the right communities). I also get the feeling that the age bracket is larger than on other platforms and people seem to be nicer too (at least compared to the month or so I spent looking through Reddit before finding Lemmy).

Following is more about the kinds of post than users. (I don't want to waste your time if that's not what you meant by "common things people see") There's also some videogame and pornography communities (I'm sure there's combinations too) so I do set my client to blur nsfw images and I block video game communities for games I don't play/don't want spoilers from.

Lots of webcomics also seem to be (automatically?) uploaded to their respective communities.

41, software dev, kids, marriage, punk/metal/hiphop, center to left politically, video games, Halloween enthusiast, scale RC trucks, Rams fan, love nerdy things, comics, ninja turtles, X-Men, Legos, theme parks, a good poop.

It's mostly nerds who had the spine to migrate from Reddit rather than continueing to feed this machine that clearly brings no good for anyone.

I’m a guy whose high school credits weren’t going to transfer so I got my GED (no diploma) and took university classes for a couple years. I got a job in tech based entirely on being self taught. I’m a cis white male, so I’ve had a lot of structural advantages.

Here’s the really fucked up part: I now moved over to a gubment job because I was uniquely qualified. None of my peers could believe it cause I’m a socialist who loathes the USA political system. But a job’s a job and this one is cushy af.

2 cats and live with my partner. Musician (as a hobby). All that stuff.

I'm here because I got permabanned on Reddit haha. Chuds mass reported me multiple times and Reddit got sick of it, I guess. Probably for the best, the website is a true shithole nowadays and absolutely overrun with literal children.

I'm an Aussie in my early-mid 30s. I've been living in the USA for the past 11 years. I've been a software developer, mostly focusing on web development, since the late 90s personally and since the mid 2000s professionally. I was an early Digg user, moved to Reddit during the Digg exodus, then moved to Lemmy during the Reddit exodus.

I believe that people on the internet should own their platform, for example run their own blog or e-commerce site, participate in decentralized services like Lemmy, etc. Opera Unite was something I found very interesting in terms of allowing people to easily run their own decentralized stuff, and I'm kinda sad it never took off. I self-host things like email and DNS.

I'm a big believer in open-source software and released my first piece of OSS in 2005.

I love listening to people that are passionate about something and get excited when talking about it. Doesn't really matter what it is or if it's a topic I'm interested in.

You'll find a lot of FOSS developers on here. This is a general community and all that, but there is a large Linux and open source software interest here. Some people simply don't understand things like the scope of FOSS software in terms of both users and developers, so that can create some tension at times. There are a lot of experts and radical thinkers in this space. You may or may not find help on super niche questions, but say something wrong or poorly, and you're likely to find the experts soon thereafter. For instance, I am confident enough to ask advanced course computer science questions and get useful answers here. I find this place useful for second sourcing info from AI that I find plausible but sketchy. Like I got into fermentation but have no interest in the whole commercialized nonsense hobby junk. Almost all sources are poisoned by commercial interests and misguided nonsense. Just asking here gets lots of people with practical knowledge on fundamental techniques from long before it was some commercialized hobby.

The group behind the fediverse is very diverse and that diversity is reflected in the user space here in Lemmy.