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Mastodon is the German nudist beach of social media. There’s a strong sense of camaraderie, but the average age is somewhere north of 50, and people under 40 instinctively cringe when they hear about it.
There are either a ton of 12 year olds on here or an ever larger number of 18 year olds.
It’s not over 30? Or on the verge of 40? I see a lotta 40+ memes and sentiments. At least in the communities I frequent.
Is the average age of a social media user really that young? Are very young adults and legally speaking children the driving force behind the base of social media? Are even modestly older individuals not willing to try and engage with this developing type of medium?
I think a lot of older people have jobs and real-life hobbies. When you’re a kid trapped in the suburbs with no neighbors to play with, you can’t drive, you can’t walk to anything, the idea of being terminally online is very appealing. I’m still growing out of it in my 30s
Me in my 40s
Thats above 20, so you’re key demographic and not at all an outlier
Give them a break. Grandpa doesn’t understand memes.
CAN YOU YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPERS WRITE A LITTLE BIGGER?
That explains a lot
Yeah, this doesn’t make me feel like the Fediverse is full of olds at all. Im old enough to be the average user’s parent.
Dad?
Are you winning, son?
If we’re picking characters, I wanna be Uncle Iroh!
Yeah… I’m definitely Bumi
As a 1,000 year old vampire, I apologise for my kind skewing the average.
As a 2,000 year old prepubescent girl, I don’t know which direction I’m skewing it.
Me as Gen Z trying to get all my Gen Z friends to join Lemmy, not very successfully. Though to be fair, I’m basically as old as you can be and still be Gen Z.
My introduction is subtle. I text content to people. When they ask me where I get it (it’s happened twice so far), I say Lemmy. They say, “what’s that.” Gives me an opportunity to explain the similarities and differences with (advantages over) Reddit. No takers yet, but it’s coming.
Re:
No takers yet, but it’s coming.
I literally have explained the open protocols for social sharing that were released years ago. I tried to tell them that nobody can track you. And the ads they see don’t go to corps but literally no buy in from my friends and family. My sister has a blue sky account and I told her she was part if the Masterdon/Lemmy federation. She just thinks blue sky is a better twitter, for now.
Bluesky uses a different protocol to mastodon.
It’s also not particularly decentralized / federated, despite what their marketing might say.
That’s not really true anymore.
There is multiple different instances now. I can use bluesky without using bluesky’s servers.I can run my own federated relay and AppView servers now?
You can.
Relay’s are less expensive now, it’s about 24 a month.app.wafrn.net is a tumblr thing with atproto support.
Same here we playing the long con.
i wish there was a useable german instance for the general public.
discuss.tchncs.de is great but as the name says, rather for techy people
feddit.org is borderline unusable garbage between political shit-takes (constant bickering and non-constructive arguments) and generally a very non-open mood, it feels to me.
Yeah it’s hard to get people to join when you explain how instances work and then immediately follow up with “never ever use [list of instances] because they oppose democracy and want the west to nuke itself.”
On Reddit there’s a lot of “lemmy’s too complicated to be adopted by the general public”. Ik we don’t all have the same tech literacy but it doesn’t seem that complicated, like, do you understand emailing? Then you understand most of what lemmy is… (also you don’t even have to understand the intricacies to enjoy your experience there)
I don’t think its just complexity, its a semi-ghost town if you venture out of the political topics.
I mean, there was never a GoT community, The Expanse Community, Rick and Morty, Squid Game, or like even a GTA community. Inactive communities with 1 post every 3 month doesn’t count.
Like this is really just a place to vent about life, and for general everyday discussions, not for topic-specific discussions.
Maybe part of why Lemmy skews older is because this is basically what “old” Reddit felt like.
Before Reddit became the Walmart of internet forums that put all the little guys out of business and gained enough critical mass to have a niche community for every topic under the sun, it was just a quirky place that catered towards tech, politics, and this exact sort of “general everyday discussion” you’re talking about.
I loved that era of Reddit, and I love that Lemmy is providing something that’s close to that experience.
Hell yeah 🤘🏻
Frankly I think it’s simply that the public doesn’t particularly care to figure it out. As an analogy, people use Windows because that’s just what their computer came with, and therefore saying that Linux is free (as in price) is a meaningless selling point to them. You don’t convince Windows users to switch by saying that Linux is free, you convince them by saying that Linux is more convenient, stable, and less annoying.
In the same way, you don’t convince the public into using Lemmy by arguing about why open protocols are better. You convince people by saying that Lemmy is basically like Reddit but not overrun by bots and spammers
age: 21 hairline:31 physical age:101
mental age: 5
pot belly: 45
nah its at 35, I have still ways to grow
Straight up archeological in this place
Me, as a Gen X, just keeping under the radar…
Get back under that radar. We have to forget you exist!
Why do you suppose this is? Are we just the only generation with the minimal tech skills needed to sign up?
Alright smarty pants. Let’s hear about some of your “minimal tech skills”.
I can open Word without blaming someone else for moving the shortcut!
Overqualified for most office jobs.
What’s Word? /s
Well I studied CS, was a Unix sysadmin for a few years, then a consultant for a enterprise software company. But I’ve been in sales for 20 years, so that should count equally against me, although I do still have some linux servers at home. I’m probably still a bit overqualified for the task of signing up to the fediverse.
I can google error codes 😅
Probably less about skill, per se, and more about interest. But the (still very low) barrier to entry probably does weed out a few kids.
Why would our age group be the only ones interested?
A longing for the Good Old Days™ of old-style forums and pre-enshittification Reddit?
Certainly my case. But most of the enshitification of Reddit happened just in the last few years, max decade. You’d think we’d at least have some 20 and 30 somethings.
I found a torrent on the piracy com where I can download episodes of Matlock and NCIS.
The young want to be near the popular crowd and the popular ones want to be where the crowd is. Classic network effect. Once you get older, that need to be in the middle of the noise and excitement goes away for many and you look for the more quiet comfortable places.
im just here cause its not an invasion of privacy and tgere are way less fascists here
Yeah, I mean I wasn’t there for old reddit and I am only on lemmy because of the reddit protests, but I couldn’t see any of my classmates using anything that’s on the fediverse.
Because we say shit like “why do you suppose this is”
Got em
I doubt it. People don’t mention when they’re young (except in some specific cases like this). Young people can’t compare things to a time they didn’t live so only older people mention their age usually. I’m 17 rn been on the fediverse since 16 or maybe 15 I don’t really remember.
Edit: I personally feel actively discouraged from mentioning my age (even irl i look older) not cause of safety or anything but I js feel like I’ll be treated differently when people know I’m younger. Its happened quite often to me both IRL and online where I’ll notice a distinct shift in tone after they know how young I am
I’m happy there are at least some young people here.
I remember when I created my first lemmy account on fediverse on lemmy.ml when I was like 15 or 16. 20 years old now, I’m in the elderly group…
I’m just happy there aren’t any, or at least many, teens and kids here. Reading the comments on Reddit, YouTube and anywhere else where they are is a fucking fever dream of stupidity, ignorance and weirdness. It’s mostly fine here, and it’s a nice break.
Do me a favor and look up the word “ageism”.
Idunno if it counts as ageism when they’re talking about stupid behavior among people with minds that are factually, biologically, not finished developing. Same reason it isn’t ageist to say “ten year olds are not allowed to drive cars because they aren’t smart enough to do it responsibly”
Never said it was ageism but I am sure it is at least close to it and a good reason to look it up.
I agree with the part here being a nice culture compared to other “social” medias. However repatriating general stupid behavior just on kids is definitely ageism - not sure if that was OPs intention.
Don’t quite agree with your comparison: What you mention is more of skill learning process. Social media is more of a proper behavior to have - I think here the age doesn’t matter nearly as much as your surrounding.
I take it you haven’t interacted with many young people since the pandemic
