Short summary (what we know from the 2023 census). Feel free to add an additional observations:
Total responses: 531 (about 8% of ~6,500 registered users at the time)
Age: the distribution peaks in the 30–39 bracket (author: “average age … a bit older than other social platforms”).
Gender: strong male skew — 441 identify as “Man”, 32 as “Woman”, 25 as “Non-binary” (plus a few others)
Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada
Education & employment: high education levels (e.g., 223 reported a Bachelor’s, 55 Master’s, 19 PhD) and ~70.8% employed full-time.
So your typical answer is coming from a fairly well educated mid 30’s Canadian guy. Huh.
Just overall needs a refresher survey as this is too old and too much has changed
One of the interesting things about surveys is you only learn about the sort of people who complete surveys.
Maybe a lot of millennials?
Idk. I’m f millennial.
Gay nerds.
communist linux users.
they’re the same picture.
Well, the fact that 87% of the respondents were from Canada already proves that it isn’t representative. Was the survey posted to lemmy.ca, perhaps?
I don’t have a better survey to share, but I think we could probably do better than this if we re-ran the survey now and made sure it was publicized on all major instances / communities.
That was my first thought, the instance was likely one from Canada
Yes it was a survey of lemmy not the entire fediverse.
lemmy.ca isn’t the entire Lemmy. (It’s not the plurality either)
You really gotta learn how Lemmy actually works. It’s not a centralized website like reddit, it’s a federated platform with many different instances. Since lemmy.ca is an instance set up specifically for Canada, it’s no surprise that it mostly has people from Canada on it. That’s in no way representative of Lemmy as a whole.
I was under the impression that lemmy and lemmy.ca were synonymous. And Canadian.
lemmy is the fediverse forum we are using.
lemmy.ca, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.zip, hexbear.net, sh.itjust.works and so on are the different servers. the servers seamlessly talk to eachother, which is why it looks like one big thing.
its sort of like email, where you have different providers to the same network so to speak. it’s for decentralization and hopefully avoid what happened to reddit and digg, and social media in general.
They are completely different servers with no relation to each other. Lemmy is primarily developed by @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml neither of whom are Canadian.
That’s actually a lower education level than than for all Canadians, IIRC. Which is interesting, since the vibe definitely is that everyone here is in STEM.
And yes, the author definitely surveyed their own instance and not all of Lemmy.
2023
So pretty much useless today
Yeah that’s when I joined . The front page was 99% star trek memes. Now it’s down to like, 70%
Has it changed much?
Considering Lemmy.ca has over 11k registered users and Lemmy as a whole over 40k active monthly users - yes.
Yes, Lemmy has grown significantly in the past two years. Hexbear has also become federated with other Lemmy instances since, which alone would completely change the demographics.
Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada
As others mentioned, this would be an interesting data point to validate. I’m not familiar with the server side of Lemmy, but does the server provide any logs which could be used with GeoIP to get a sense of the relative number of connections from different countries? While there is likely to be some misreporting due to VPN usage and the like, it’s likely to be a low enough number of connections to be ignored as “noise” in the data. Depending on the VPNs in question, it may also be possible to run down many of the IP addresses which are VPNs in the connections logs and report “VPN user” as a distinct category. This would also be interesting to see broken out by instance (e.g. what countries are hitting lemmy.world versus lemmy.ml versus lemmy.ca etc.).
All that said, thank you for sharing. These sorts of exercises can be interesting to understand what a population looks like.
The reason the survey shows that many canadian people is probably much simpler. The survey was hosted on lemmy.ca
OP didn’t knew a lemmy server was federated with other lemmy servers. They thought lemmy was centralized and canadian
