First of all, I don’t mean this post as a complaint, maybe more of a warning?
There is teenagers on the fediverse. Most of them don’t share their age, for hopefully obvious reasons. I’d say that a lot of the accounts which do a lot of posting/commenting are run by teenagers — because most adults probably wouldn’t have the time for that much posting.
While the young people of this generation are generally useless when it comes to something more complicated than microsoft word, the people who are good at technology, usually are very good at it.
most of my friends (most of which don’t know the difference between a laptop and a desktop) could understand the fediverse as a concept perfectly when I explained it to them irl.
So, if you’re in a really stupid argument with someone, try to remember that there is a small chance they are 14.
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Most of us would post on forums as teens back in the day, so it’s hypocritical to try to keep them from doing it too. The only places we should run them off would be communities we specifically make for adults. They don’t necessarily have to be NSFW. Sometimes it’s just nice to have a community where everyone is old enough that they get the same references and are in similar stages in life.
General music and hobby related communities really shouldn’t be blocked off, though.
we would not stop from accessing adult stuff, if we wanted to. so trying to hard prevent them now would be hypocritical too imo. it is our job as parents to prepare them as good as we can.
A friend and I just yesterday talked about that and how we both visited some random sites/communities back then. How we had ICQ Chats with adults as 13-somethings, phone calls, about the blogosphere, how some Internet friends asked whether you needed something and send it on a disc via Mail.
I suppose if I were a teenager again, I would be here too.
I mean, as a teenager, if a community says in the rules that its for adults only, I’d avoid it.
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Honestly I think that’s unusual for a teenager
WARNING To the People of Earth: Teenagers exist. BEWARE
Pretty much yeah, most people assume that no one under 30 is on fedi because its “hard” to use.
18 here started when I was 17
I’m 19 and assumed that there are at least a few. And with that I’m correct.
You are.
What part of the fediverse is “hard” to use?
Lemmy is easier to use than the UBB forum I started to become active on at the age of 10 that was the entry point for me being on the Internet at all. Back then we didn’t have Markdown, but BBCode, and I had that figured out after a few weeks.
I think you’re way underestimating young people.
I started to think it’s because of the result from years of a lot of people being trained and marinated by big tech in siloed opaque social media and website sign ups, where everything is it’s own thing with almost no interconnectedness and communication between each other. So it seems hard when they (me too admittedly) see all this instance thing and federated that.
Also IMO fediverse has a too nerdy and being infodumped on image to me. That image, at least on the threadiverse side, seems to be toned down and normie-d with recent “campaigns” on reddit though.
You guys really do need to not be too nerdy lol.
The assumptions that people make about age boggle my mind. You know that the people who made the internet are all “old” now, right?
Yeah, though most people severely underestimate, or overestimate the internets age.
I’m 24 and I’m using it just fine. I’d say that after signing up somewhere and getting an app to login into, the rest is pretty simple and much similar to reddit
With lemmy? definitely! On the mastodon side of things? no. Mastodon seems to be for german middle aged bikers now.
Oh boy, I should get on Mastodon!
You should also check sharkey!
Invite only instances are even worse because of constant fear of banhammer treatment for wrongthink and then making second account is kinda hard
This was a while ago, but that instance was invite only because they moved to sharkey.social.
How is Mastodon harder? (Legit question, not snark)
There is more missing replies/reactions, and picking an instance is a bit harder imo. Also search is completely broken.
Well, I don’t know. Mastodon seems fine to me too
Fedi does screw heavy middle aged and male and US but any one who can handle Linux can figure our how to operate here haha
Yeah kids might be retarded tech wise now but there is always the nerds who excel at tech so they would naturally end up here
Careful there, there are boomers on lemmy
Start making the list, all of them are going to a FEMA camp staffed by Obama death panels just like fox news promised in 2012!
Just a heads up, thats considered a slur.
Also, you’re forgetting the germans! Fedi seems really popular there.
This is actually a good thing - teenagers are known to bring niche things into popular culture! For some reason the whole of society kind of cares what they think is cool
Most free time, rich teens spending their parents money drive our trends probably , not even probably thats most influencers, like alix earle , its funny af that all the girls ik that repost eat the rich and shit follow her and taylor swift
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You are either a 14 year old socialist furry or a 35 year old Linux user on the fedi. No in between
I am a 30 year old socialist furry Linux user on the fedi. But that’s just the exception that proves the rule.
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It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.
In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.
It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.
And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.
I think a lot of the loss of civility comes from the fact that lemmy is just so left leaning. I don’t feel the need hear to defend the dems because I know that 90% of the users here understand that the dems are in fact at least marginally better than the other choice. IRL I run dem apologia on occasion because I might not like what they are doing but at least they pretend to care.
14 going on 40 so it will be some spirited ebeef. No quarter will be given
As a teenager who is relatively tech-savvy and on the fediverse, can confirm. I think it’s gotten to the point where even less technically inclined people can join fairly easily, but the more savvy are usually the first to flee from enshittifying platforms so we see a lot more of them here.
https://lemmy.cafe/post/14200034
Be careful admitting that.
Teenager ≠ underage, 18 and 19 year olds exist. But thanks for your concern. :)
Why do you think teens are generally stupid?
As a teenager, I get in stupid arguments making stupid points because in my head, being right is important.
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Look back at the shit you wrote as a teenager. We were all dumb.
I’d say that a lot of the accounts which do a lot of posting/commenting are run by teenagers — because most adults probably wouldn’t have the time for that much posting.
Challenge accepted.
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Minors are going to access the internet no matter what you do, it’s on them an their underdeveloped brains on whether or not they can handle it.
If their parents don’t care enough, then let them be raised here, amongst the stable minds that think anything to the left of burning kids alive for warmth is tankieism (.world) or anything to the right of luxury gay space communism is fascism (all the sane instances).
They won’t, lemm.ee has a policy on federation, and they wouldn’t let kids get in the way of it.
Ah yes, of course other generations are much better with technology than today’s teens.
They are, teenagers (saying this as a teenager) are hopeless. Tech became so easy to use that anything requiring a tiny bit of effort is impossible for these people.
Its the same as its always been. There was always a small subset of the population interested and developing computer sciences. There was never this time where all the youngins knew computers like they did breathing. That was a fallacy.
You’re right, but at least most millennials seem to be able to update windows, or download a youtube video if they’re determined enough.
I would say you are kinda right, but working help desk for a few years taught me there are still a ton of dumb ass millennial users.
There is dumbasses in every age demographic, but the eejits in my generation are especially bad imo.
It always seem like that. I used to think like that too, 15 years ago
Eh, scratch that, I still think like that.
Not most I know lol
At least the older ones.
In the 30s range at least in my experience.
Yep, fedi seems to have a lot of them.
You’re admitting that after teens just got banned? Guess thats why its a throwaway lol
At 14, me and most of my peers could navigate a file system on DOS, format floppies, install games from setup disks, and edit autoexec.bat files.
Yes, there is a huge difference between the teens of today and the teens of 25 years ago. Technological illiteracy is real thanks to the iPhone era and UIs becoming stupid simple to use.
The “iPad kids” meme didn’t originate from thin air.
Congrats, you lived in a social bubble. As we all do. Your sounds fun, so cherish the memories and don’t pretend your experience is universal.
There’s kids today that still do that. And plenty of kids that’s call you a virgin and stuff you in a locker for being able to use a computer without a gui
I’ve long assumed that many (most?) of the tankies, and of hexbear’s userbase in general, are teens.
The Lemmy devs themselves are around 18, I think.
One of them has a kid, so not too sure about that
That would explain their behavior.
You people still get into arguments online? Discussions, sure… but arguments? o.O
Oh my sweet, summer child…
Ha! I wish.
@Angelusz @throwaway Only with Nazis, racist and bigots.
YOU GET INTO INTERNET ARGUMENTS ALL THE TIME, YOU FUNGDARK! YOU’RE IN ONE NOW!
Ah cool hang on, just let me get some snacks and a drink before we get in to it.
There are* teenagers
Teenagers now get banned if they tell their age anyway: [email protected]
To any teens who come across this post, do NOT admit you’re underage or were underage at time of account creation anywhere, anytime for any reason
It’s like Rule 1 of the internet.
Sincerely, The kids who grew alongside the internet since the 90s
Duh, I was born in 1901, why do you ask?
I was totally above 13 or had parental consent when I went to forums in the early 2000s. I totally wasn’t actually 9.
It’s wild to me this concept disappeared? It’s literally never been a good idea to reveal you’re a minor online. The laws are against you. Companies don’t want to deal with a curated minor experience, even less so in the current times. If they do, you get the crappier version of things.
The worst thing to happen to the Internet is when Facebook normalized using your real name and real info online.
I agree. The main thing is teenagers wanting to discuss stuff about them, like on r/teenagers on reddit.
If it’s anything like Reddit, it would devolve into being mostly creepy adults.
A/S/L
14/f/under your floorboards
Even if the instance doesn’t have any rules about it?
That is not Fediverse specific. That’s general internet behaviour.
Meh. At least pretending to be an adult feels like a pretty low bar.
Nobody should pretend and nobody should have to li
Also, nobody should volunteer age info for no reason… Esp under age crowd. Fucking pedos everywhere
And what’s the problem with that?
Laws don’t currently make a concession for federated social media. If the law in an instance’s jurisdiction says that users on a platform must be of a certain age, then for practical/enforcement purposes it makes no difference if they’re local or federated.
FWIW, I also ban people under age 18 on my instance (local and federated). Obviously I can’t know everyone’s age, but if someone offers it and I become aware, and it’s below the minimum age set in our policy, then they’re banned until they’re of age - simple as that.
I’m in the US, so 13 is the minimum age by law for most services (COPPA), and there’s various grumblings to increase the age specifically for social media, so I’m playing it safe with 18 which is the age you’re legally considered an adult.
Considering some of the stuff that gets posted here (legitimately and via bad actors), then my legal liabilities are less as I’m going out of my way to only serve adults on the platform. Mind you, I’m running this as a hobby / volunteer and do not have a team of lawyers on hand.
