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.
Surprise, surprise. Some chunk of Reddit annoyances stem from kids running around amok.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
In short time it becomes increasingly annoying to browse let alone post to get past the anti teen rules filter. Not to mention all the young hormones commenting some stuff at you like it is school break slander or smh
One can always change instance though so it isn’t doom and gloom. The kids will have Lemmy.world and nice, enjoy it and have fun. It is the club penguin of Lemmy instances. We knew this would happen
Brooo I had no idea... how could this happen? I never would've guessed there could be teenagers despite at one point being one and using the internet. I get you're probably pretty new to being online but like come on, the rest of the world doesn't discover things at the rate you do...
It should not be that surprising. Many teenagers are really smart, curious and will find their way here. That said I realise your warning is well intentioned; I hope Lemmy remains a more civil place than Reddit became over the last ten years, for everyone; teenagers included.
But don’t assume everyone who is very active is a teenagers.
Some of us aren’t ;).
And you don’t have to understand federation to use lemmy. I’ve brought a couple of gen-z ers here. Get them to download voyager. Voyger automatically suggests lemm.ee for account creation. And then you just use it like reddit. Super simple.
Listen teens, I'm 40. I was a niteclub bouncer in a town popular with backpackers and partying, I also did a lot of traveling and partying. I was shameless, its a miracle it didnt fall off.
When you say you fucked my mom, its childish and stupid. When I say I fucked your mom while its not likely its possible... and thats worse.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Honestly as an older person it very much feels like a lot of Lemmy is under 25. 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.
Assuming someone to develop a sufficient consciousness of their time starting with age 10 that would mean anything before 2010.
In all practical matter, people who are 25 now, cannot have any practical recollection of the US invasion of Iraq and are only having broad ideas of the 2007 financial crisis.
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.
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.
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.
On my main account (this is a throwaway, if the username didn't already suggest that) I'm sure if you dug around enough you'd find out my age, but it would be a lot of effort.
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.
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.
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.
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 blame gen x and millennials...we made shit easy from the hard shit we built/had...and once everything was a button press the new generations went all Idiocracy.
Huge variations. I'd say probably the technologically literate percentages of people is about the same... but tech has allowed the technologically illiterate the ability to use the internet.
They start out as discussions, but it only takes one party to turn that into an argument. Generally though, continuing the argument is more to convince onlookers than the argumentative party.
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.
I'm actually surprised that a few lemmy instances allow minors to sign up. I don't get it. It's always a liability and platforms tend to become dystopian in the name of "protecting the children" and to comply with additional laws and requirements...
Honestly I'm now thinking of migrating from lemm.ee now that I learned of it allowing minors, this instance could turn into shit because of it. Example: "we'll defederate from any mature instance because the kids can't see boob"
Lemm.ee allows minors out of the same school of thought why it allows federation with nearly all instances there are, including NSFW: liberalism (as in: freedom)
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).
Isn't it wise to do some sort of age check before someone can access the adult subs? If this becomes a trend among teenagers, I can already see parents halting that just because of easy adult access. Pixelfed for instance has parental controls.
i dont do pixelfed, so idk what parental control they have. but what kind of system is gonna stop teens from making an account without their parents knowledge? and no, age verification wont work. there is a mysterious thing happening, where teenagers immediately turn 45 for the duration of any "please enter your age" question on the internet.
A parent can flag an account of their children, that the child has to accept. They would of course do this together sitting next to each other, so the child has no choice but to accept. Then, the parent can control the content the child sees.
Honestly age verification other than ID checks will never work. But to send your ID to the owner of an instance is of a whole other level, that the people who join / have joined and even the instance owners are probably unwilling to accept. And they wouln't be wrong for that.