this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
132 points (97.1% liked)
Asklemmy
53596 readers
1434 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's pretty much just that there are a lot of Germans.
The population of Germany is about 80 million.
All else being equal, there are 16 times more Germans online than us finns, for example.
Next to the USs 300 million people, that's still one German about every 5 people. Add to that that Germans are definitely online more than americans, and yeah...
A lot of Germans.
What do you mean, Germans are "online more than americans"?
The USs social media user count is at 73% of population, to Germany's 77%. Smaller difference that I expected, but I did remember correctly, that the US has lower penetration.
USA does have higher time spent online per person though.
Ok, but if you consider that there are 80M Germans, there are also 60M French (+African countries), and 50M Spanish (+ LatAm). That would make for a language ratio of ~1:1:1 considering Europe alone. This clearly doesn't seem to be the case, so I'm just curious what the reason behind the strong adoption in German speaking countries could be...
60 millions Italian also.
As a neighbour (and disliker) of that country I can't tell you how many German tourists I've seen immediately speaking germ and just assuming everyone needs to understand.
Probably why they are the only ones posting in their language here
I'm probably quite biased being German myself, but I feel like that things like privacy and security tend to be more important to Germans than to other folks. And I don't speak just about the tech bubble, it shows everywhere.
To give a random example, when a license plate has been blurred in a photo posted anywhere, chances are high it's been posted by a German. Despite the fact that there is no license plate lookup (like carfax for US, finnik.nl for Netherlands, car.info for Sweden etc) so a license plate wouldn't even reveal anything to anyone, yet we treat it like a secret on instinct. If you ask such a German why he blurred it, he probably won't have a reasonable response, he just does it because he feels like it.
(Edit: Just look through the used cars here, most if not all will have their plates censored given they have plates on them lol)
Getting back to topic, this might not be the only explanation, but I'm pretty sure it's a noticable factor why Germans are especially present on platforms like this, i.e. platforms that tend to respect the user's privacy more than the big tech corporations.
Hmm that's fascinating. I didn't realize you guys had such a strong cultural tendency towards privacy. Do you think there's a specific thing that caused it, or has it always been this way?
Most of this privacy fetish is purely performative though. The Schufa is a dystopian data collector with information on every German and despite a token focus on data privacy politicians pass more and more surveillance laws like using Palantir for the police and crackdowns on free speech and protesting in general.
Half of Google streetview is blurred here
I think it took us 4 or 5 years of frog boiling until street view cars were allowed here (and only once google made it possible to have your home be censored)
Hmm I don't know actually, but now I'm curious too. From quick search:
https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/coronavirus-germany-privacy/
Interesting, although seeing as being sensitive about privacy isn't as big in other post communist countries (at least not here in Czechia), I assume it must just be a generic cultural trait
Well the German Democratic Republic is unique among the former USSR countries in that it was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany. The latter already had a strong focus on privacy laws resulting from the Nazi time (meaning there was strong mistrust towards the state, but Nazis trying to hide in plain sight was obviously also relevant). But when the sheer amount of information the communist intelligence services were storing on their citizens became known after reunification this pre-existing privacy bias was put into overdrive, it confirmed all the worst fears west Germans already had about the state becoming too powerful.
then you would also have to include the Austrians and our Brothers in Cheese π
Yeah, I haven't noticed an unusual amount. Lemmy is still mostly Americans, and then maybe Brits and Germans. Just anyone that can speak English and has had broadband long enough to acclimatise to nerd culture, basically.
How can we even, like, know that?
I don't have hard data, but it seems self-evident just from my personal experience. And going back to the original point, it's a nation of 400 million.
The amount of American politics and culture on here for a start
To be fair the amount of absolute insanity coming out of the US is what's driving it. Luckily the UK has been fairly stable recently.
They'll tell you before you can ask
Yeah, occasionally. Honestly that's fine, the annoying thing is when they assume everyone else is, too.