With the recent issues of Tea (teaforwomen.com) posting unsecured user data, it’s easy to spot the heavy bias of male users in the comments. With a 90% male demographic, Lemmy will face problems related to a homogeneous user population and all the issues that come with it. Right now, it’s shaping up to be misogynistic, but it could also head into other bad places. Lemmy needs to attract a more diverse population of users or will end up as another echo chamber for the like minded. https://www.similarweb.com/website/lemmy.ml/#demographics
How could that possibly lead to a bias? /s
If you have 10,000+ users that are a representative sample of all internet users (or pretty close), your estimates should be pretty good for popular sites.
Your sample might still be small for lemmy.ml.
I think the demographic for lemmy (and lemmy.ml in particular) is so niche and so biased towards privacy that even with a bigger sample, it’s next to impossible to get really good data. Probably good enough to say that it’s very likely that there’s a significantly skewed gender distribution, though. The user polls that were done on my instance showed similar results IIRC.
Agreed on both counts! :)