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.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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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…
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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"
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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
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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.
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One factor is German history with Stasi und ww2 fascism. We like increased independence and privacy, so lemmy rather than Facebook
Now tell your car manufacturers that people would like privacy, not always-online cars.
Not that the others are any better, of course.
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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!)
"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.
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Germany is also 2nd for self hosters, after US. According to a self hosting survey.
Can you link me to that survey? I'd like to share that with a friend if you would be so kind.
Of course!
https://selfh.st/survey/2024-results/
It is a great self hosting resource: https://selfh.st/
Gotta say, I love reading the German memes in /all, even if I have a kindergarten-level understanding of German.
No idea WTF is happening on ich iel half the time but it seems hilarious.
Neither have I, and I'm German. But that's part of why it's so appealing
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a kindergarten-level understanding of German.
I love the serendipitous use of kindergarten, with it being of German origin :)
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In my experience, the mental effort spent trying to understand the German in a meme makes the comedic payout better
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Simple, we germans were the biggest non-English ones on reddit, too.
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.
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It’s more efficient to gather in one place
It happens, things become more popular in some countries than others ,and Germany has 80+ million people so it's not that small.
What I'm more surprised with is almost no content in Spanish, either from Spain or Latin America, just because of the number of speakers. I mean Hindi and Chinese are spoken by more people, but they tend to have their own software ecosystems.
I guess the question is, what are Spanish speakers using for social media
Spanish user here; I tend to avoid spanish speaking reddit, because they lean heavily towards neoliberal or the right in there.
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Well educated, tech savvy, but also socially awkward. The Venn diagram is almost a circle.
Germans are low key into cool cultures
I guess, because Most of us are nerds 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...
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Mastodon was made by a german. I think that made the concept of the fediverse popular to germans.
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As a kind of unique exception (!melbourne@aussie.zone being the other one), the mods of /r/ich_iel pointed out to feddit.de (previous version of feddit.org) in a pinned post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ich_iel/comments/14d65o7/%C3%B6ffentliche_dienstmeldung_%C3%A4nderung_der/
Compare this to all of the other country/regional subs who would remove similar posts for "self promotion", and you get why the German population was guided here instead of having to hear it from an second level comment on a Sunday thread
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Its just a scam perpetrated by Big Germany. Don’t let it scare you
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.
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