Nothing against Germans, I’m just wondering why, outside of the English internet, it got such high adoption in Germany compared to eg. France or Spain. I see next to no French/Spanish/etc. content on here in comparison

  • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlOP
    5·
    3 hours ago

    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…

    • cageythree@lemmy.ml
      7·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      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.

      • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlOP
        5·
        2 hours ago

        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?