Agree. But it's not kids, it's stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole.
Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down.
I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I think you‘re onto something. I read a lot of comments of people thinking the fediverse is too complicated to deal with and while I disagree - but also think it has issues - there does seem to be a barrier of entry for a good portion of people in the form of „inconvenience.“ So whoever is here really wants to be here and not just be an anonymous arse. I don‘t think you gotta be particularly smart, you gotta step out of your comfort zone.
Hmm this is also a good point. I've been explaining to redditors that Lemmy is not that complicated and only takes a couple minutes to get started. But reading this, now I'm hoping Lemmy can find the balance between number of active users and quality of content. I'm wondering if my spreading the word on reddit was a bad idea.
Maybe the "work" required to make the jump to Lemmy will be enough to keep lower quality content (for whatever reason) at bay for a bit longer, though. Of course, it won't last forever. All we can do is make our communities good spaces from the get-go and try to maintain them carefully as we grow.
I think the way Lemmy works (wrt federations) makes this less of an issue. Eventually people who like the way things used to be will primarily use oldhead instances that only federate with other oldhead instances. Lemmy.world will end up feeling just like Reddit (more or less) but there will always be spaces for other communities.
I think it‘s good to grow. Lemmy (or the Fediverse, I suppose?) should be as inclusive, convenient, and engaging as can be. It has only just started (in my opinion), we‘ll see how it goes. I like it here so far, feels like people are less prone to jump at your throat for voicing a (harmless) opinion.
Which part of it is supposed to be complicated? I've seen this argument many times, and while I'm still trying to figure out the user interface(s), the whole idea is pretty basic
This kept me off Lemmy until the blackout. I was interested prior to that, but so many people said it was complicated, I figured I'd look into it at some vague point in the future when I had time to untangle the fediverse. Then the baclout happened, and what do you know I had time, and lo and behold it was easy. I'm now a bit annoyed I was dissuaded for so long based on BS about it being complicated.
I just had to find an instance (or "site") that allowed sign-ups and register. My first account was on Kbin since it seemed less buggy on mobile. I feel like they think something's complicated just because it's on a website, or because there are multiple options.
It’s not rocket science but if we’re being honest about it, it’s not exactly an easy concept either. Going from centralised to decentralised for a social network is not an easy idea especially when one isn’t familiar with federation.
For example, at first I was confused because I’d browse a community on lemmy.ml, I’d want to hit subscribe, but then my account is on lemmy.world.
The fact that the website “moves” while I’m reading a post, doesn’t help either.
I had to get a better grip with defederation too. So, on one instance you see 4 comments, but another instance has 5. Because one of the instances doesn’t federate (at least that’s how I understand it now). Or maybe it’s just lag?
Anyway what I’m getting at is I understand why people say it’s complicated and I for one wouldn’t have bothered to get familiar with these concepts if reddit wasn’t going kaboom.
I can‘t tell you since I also disagree. I did basically the same thing I did on Reddit, I only got thrown off seeing multiple „subs“ with the same name.
Some people complained how complicated „explanations“ are. I saw these types of comments on the Reddit Alternatives sub.
I would guess the whole "federation" part. It can be confusing for non tech minded people to try and understand distributed sites. They might not understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml while both being lemmy are not the same site.
Getting one’s head around the concept of instances is hard for some people who aren’t used to dealing with tech beyond the basic social platforms.
Is it one social media platform, or is it a bunch of individual ones? The fact that the answer is “it depends” is confusing. Especially when you get into defederation and cross-platform interaction.
Very true. I often make the mistake of thinking that if something makes sense to me pretty quickly, it will be just as quick for others.
We should remember that those of us here now are more likely to be uniquely interested in this tech and thus more able to wrap our heads around these concepts without being deterred. We could always do a better job making it accessible for beginners who don’t benefit from the same background.
I'm also a bit confused by it being 'complex'. I created an account (I chose .world as it had world in the name, as it turned out that was a great decision lol), you log in, click on 'all' and sort by top/day you've essentially got 'Reddit', or am I missing something lol.
Reddit karma wasn't about popularity or intelligence. It was about who got there first. If you shotgun enough comments into brand new threads your karma will skyrocket.
When IRC was entirely people on command line clients that existed on *nix. But that has changed with the ease of use of clients for Windows, and then eventually web clients.
You know, it's so funny (though obviously not in an enjoyable way per se) how those folks are so selective and picky about freedom. Like freedom is OK when it's the freedom to enter a supermarket without a mask, but it's not OK when it's the freedom to express your gender. And as in this example, when it comes to corporate masters...
Don't you just love capitalism? And don't you just loooooove capitalists? It's honestly frightening how reminiscent it is to the way the fascists took power in 1930s Germany.
And by the way, I'm noticing a parallel with how much they not only embrace conservative evangelical Christendom, but also act like it's the epitome of freedom and liberty - the American Dream, if you will. If you attend one of the US's most notorious fundie schools, you're not allowed to stay up late, mingle with the opposite gender too much, attend dances, or be pretty much anything other than cishet (and implicitly, cishet white male). The irony of how said school is named "LIBERTY" University never seems to die on me.
Conservatives love giving lip service to freedom, but they hate anyone actually exercising their freedom.
Basically they only care about appearances and are devoid of any actual substance. That's why they scream "virtue signaling" so much. Since they have no real virtue, they can't conceive of anyone else having any either.
I think you need to consider the immense capability of humans for self-deceit, false logic and just think and act driven by emotion and then post-hoc using thinking to fit some explanation for it.
Also there are way more people who never learned to think in a structured way than there are people who have, plus even the former can be subtly sawed swayed by their own wants, needs and fears (it mostly happen at the level of interpreting things with many possible interpretations and our judgment of the likelihood of various explanations where there are various possibilities, in my experience).
My point being that you can't really "read" them as thinking things through and then knowingly choosing to deceive: I think that at least the ones who just parrot that stuff do not at all internally operate like that.
A lot of the political discussion I’ve read on here has also been pretty well thought out. I feel like people are taking time to explain their perspective more and even if in general it’s been more left leaning there is definitely more nuance. I was surprised by the quality of some of the discussion around the end of affirmative action.
not speaking for OP but when I think about not wanting "kids" around, I mean immature people. I'm looking to be part of something like the reddit prior to them buying Alien Blue.
Agree. I suspect that the UX challenge of the Fediverse as well as the fact that you'd largely only migrate here if you're ideologically displeased with the admins means that people on this site skew more mature.
As a fellow teenager and a FOSS enthusiast, Linux user and Linux tinkerer and hobbyist, I'm glad to see there are more people my age getting into the FOSS space.
Same same, it is mostly the matter of your FOSS knowledge, if you were a FOSS nerd you would most likely to switch from reddit in some way or another... (16 btw)
And hopefully never will be. It seems like the people hosting instances aren't in it for the money. Particularly the *.world guys have other fediverse projects big enough that they could've done something like, say, add ads to it.
This is what's so great about the Fediverse! Not only do most servers make their finances public, but a lot of them can be fiscally hosted by 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Which means that they can not only receive tax-deductible donations from users, but they can also apply for grants and receive donations from charity funds. Was kinda shocked the degree to which this happens setting up my small Mastodon server lol.
please don't randomly start some ageism crap suddenly now please.
the vibes are good because we collectively experience self-efficacy against the corporate super power that is reddit.
All people should feel welcome on lemmy
I disagree. Terrible take. It's never wise to discount, alienate, or exclude our youth. Growth is the name of the game and they're the ones who are going to be ushering in hopefully a better future. Who will they learn from if not us? You want them stewing with each other?
No. We maintain whatever nebulous internet "culture" we like and establish rules. Anyone, young or old, who doesn't adhere can suck eggs. That way young people learn how to act and we can hear them tell us about all the ways we need to better society.
Truly I believe that the children who develop during this time of overstimulation and rapid technological advancement will emerge maybe a bit... maladapted but better than us. Humans can be so resilient especially under supportive circumstances. Our intelligence is adaptive. So if you want to make a great internet community, maintain your respect for our kids.
At this point I'm just so burnt out on the constant advertisements. It's literally shoved in your face at all times and not only does it make me actively avoid the products but its also exhausting.
Constant advertisements wearing you down? Now there's anti-advertisement spray! Just click here to read our website that totally isn't astroturfing. You too can be without advertising. JUST CLICK HERE!!!
“Hello, I’m the ceo of Anti-Advertisement spray. After 5 long hard years in development, we’re here to talk about this stuff and shove this product down your throats. AMA!”
1.5k upvotes, people fawning over the person, stupid gold and all the stupid badges attached to the post…. FFS.
This is it for me. The Pavlovian posting and upvoting of shitty jokes in every. single. thread. I haven't bothered with reddit's comment section in years because of it. Here, the comments so far seem chill and appropriate for the posts.
Agreed. On top of this I noticed a pretty hard decline in Reddit once the CCP bought a portion of reddit. Keeping business out of Lemmy will keep it honest for sure.
Don't hold the Ads too high. If server costs for lemmy instances become too expensive, Admins might have to resort to ads and I would argue that reddits ads are way better than most intrusive web apps
I think it's more just because we're early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
We're building something here - and right now, for some it's a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn't just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)
Admins go bad, already some of the instances I'm on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.
But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can't go far before we leave... What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we're missing out on content elsewhere.
And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We're going to face difficult times, but it's a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn't start or end with a reddit clone.
And I think that's why we care - because this time is different. It can't go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it's built from all of us
This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital
I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
Yes, and because there are some little hurdles in the signup process. Having to select an instance isn't really that big of a deal, but it will actually stop quite a few people.
The people who do make it through care or are invested enough to join and are less likely to shit the place up. It's a self-selection process.
Great post.
Lemmy right now reminds me of Reddit 15-16 years ago. Mostly tech workers or tech hobbyists who know far more than an average person and thus aren't put off by something new and different. I don't think Lemmy is very complicated as a concept and it boggles my mind that people are saying "making a new account on Lemmy.world or Kbin.social is too complicated for normal people." Yet I see it written all the time, sometimes here but mostly on reddit. And who knows; maybe the latter is a disinformation campaign since we know reddit pulls sneaky shit like that all the time (and targeting Lemmy, like with the warnings they placed on links at one point).
Lemmy's barriers to entry also somewhat remind me of early Facebook after they expanded to several universities. You needed to have an email address from one of those univerisities in order to create an account. So, not so much self selection in that scenario but another gate to keep people out.
I can respect Tildes' decision to become invite-only (with a very limited number of invites) for that reason. Lemmy, I think, is prioritizing growth at the potential cost of future community. Tildes is doing the opposite. I don't think one is necessarily more correct. And, with Lemmy, there are tons of alternatives waiting in the wings. Hopefully a balance can be struck.
I think the real test comes when the first wave of good third party apps are released. Sync, in particular, seems very promising given the developer's reddit app. Anything that can make it easier for people.
Hey I just said I reqllly found your comment really informative and insightful, and albeit I have some vague ideas on how it is part of survivorship bias, i can't quite tell what you refer to?
What I'm talking about is mostly negative bias so I might be wrong
I think the influence on Reddit was deeper than a lot of people have considered. The hivemind was so strong it made it difficult to have decent and useful discussion, even the puns that muddied down nearly every post's comments achieved that end. The amount of posts I've seen of people feeling much more comfortable actually interacting on Lemmy, in my mind, lends weight to how Reddit wasn't a place for objective dialogue. That's why it felt so adolescent, like sitting at a high school lunch table.
I'm of the opinion that the two years of COVID driven existential fear and uncertainty around death, of both ourselves and our loved ones, is a global impact that will ripple through behavior for many years. We monkeys all act out our traumas. That's okay, it's part of the healing process and will eventually become a fading memory replaced by better ones, births, new relationships, triumphs and laughter.
In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they've come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I'm of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone's intellect, wisdom, and insight. I'm in my mid 30s and have a master's degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who've lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy's narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that's what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
Maybe the OP refers to the "mentally kids" people, not just ordinary kids. And I'm sure glad to see civilized and mature conversations for once, not just nonsense spewing trolls responding with "nice argument, but ur mum" types
When I was a kid I thought grown ups were annoying, when I was in my 20s I thought teenagers were annoying, in my 30s I think people in their 20s are annoying. People will always have something to complain about others. “Kids” is just a different group for different people.
Some of us are old enough to remember when social media sites that were "too big to die" died. We've been burned before, so we're making plans before that happens.
I only joined Reddit five years ago. Leaving Reddit turned out to be pretty easy because I had other things to occupy my time with. I have a feeling that it's because I was never that attached to reddit to begin with.
I can relate to this. I think I've been on Reddit for about 6 years. I probably had a bit of an addiction but I used to be pretty serious into forums and I have already learned how to disconnect from internet communities more than a decade ago.
I'm only going back to reddit here and there so I can use Joey till the end. It's like going back to an old house you still have the keys to and wandering around thinking of the memories.
I don't remember exactly how I came to Reddit, but I know I'm in the 13-year club. I remember when all the Digg users came over and remember they're being a lot of anger and memes about it. But I've been around long enough to where moving to a different platform doesn't phase me in the slightest. In fact, I'm really enjoying this feeling of a reinvigorated community.
The amount of generational hate and is really ridiculous… I don't consider myself a kid with 21, but seriously, I'm happy if younger people join here and also embrace this space. And just acting as if everyone of a specific age would be the same is… oof
I remember shortly after the death of digg rage comics being peak humor and suddenly an influx of kids not understanding how to make a rage comic killing that sub.
It reminds me of the day the internet died, when so many new AOL users overwhelmed the forums at the time and killed all the etiquette that had formed up to that point. Internet been stagnant for longer than it should have been. I’m excited to see where things go now.
Maturity really isn't the same as age: plenty of legally adult people (many already so for decades) around who are anything but mature individuals.
That said, as others here I think the absence of the subtle pressures derived from commercialization and profit-seeking make most of the difference.
Also, I've been thinking about the possibiility that both those already in Lemmy before and the Reddit refugees who came in recently, are at the most principled end of the spectrum compared with those still in Reddit (whose principles on the subject of ultra-authoritarian top-down imposition as done in Reddit clearly aren't strong enough to make them try something else), possibly also more confortable with change. This might make the crowd here at the moment a self-selected bunch leaning significantly more towards a certain psychological profile than the average which in turn (or so is my theory) affects the dominant tone of discussions here.
It doesn't even really matter what the common traits are of the self-selcting group of people who are here in the early days. They exist and therefore that group is more alike each other than at a broader platform like at Reddit. Even if we are all objectively ignorant jerks, because we are similar we will feel that the people we are talking with are decent and smart because they have similar strengths and blindspots to ourselves (think of any community that is repellent to you. The people in there all seem to think one another are wonderful.)
I suspect that one of the reasons Lemmy's texts are longer, meatier, and more thoughtful is the age of the users. My gut tells me that we're an older audience that doesn't need to dump the usual social media BS - hasty comments filled with unsubstantiated arguments.
Everyone has an opinion and should be heard and respected. As a Reddit refugee, I feel Lemmy provides such space, and that's what I enjoy most. Like many others whose profiles match mine, once you get past the initial confusion (where should I register, what app should I use, where can I comment) and get comfortable with the jargon, you feel more encouraged to participate in discussions.
So far, I've been pleased with the civil environment of the discussions, as most users are able to express their thoughts in a relaxed and non-toxic manner. Honestly, I'd encourage anyone who has been just lurking to participate and share their thoughts.
To add to that: I think it's actually worthwhile to write longer texts here compared to reddit because of two reasons: 1) people here want Lemmy to succeed so they put more time and effort in to get things going, and 2) it's more likely for that text to be seen by others because there aren't 2.000 other commenters but maybe 20.
True. The sense of anticipation of a new home in which to settle seems genuine. Also, I agree that a smaller group where users actually read the posts and interact with each other validates the purpose of investing the time to share one's views with people who are actually interested.
it's more likely for that text to be seen by others because there aren't 2.000 other commenters but maybe 20.
This specific issue is why I pivoted to mostly lurking Reddit – outside of the hobby subs, discussion of any relevance to the content posted is pretty hard to come by (like fucking askreddit??????how is that such a circlejerk of one-liners)
I have to either dig 10+ replies in to a tangentially related top-level comment, or scroll past the shit jokes and hope there's something before hitting downvoted troll bedrock. This could well be a scale issue that we'll see in time, but hopefully enough people can keep setting up and joining instances to mitigate it
My only concern is that Google doesn't seem to be indexing lemmy pages. So even if we add content that might be helpful it is not getting any screentime.
To add to that, searching isn't as simple as "best laptops reddit" if the knowledge is spread across the fediverse. That's something I'd be interested to see
That seems like a problem that search providers will have a strong incentive to solve from their end as and when finding those fediverse results becomes essential.
Your second point is exactly why I rarely made much of an effort in the more popular posts. I was a regular commenter with detailed comments on the dog training sub because it was a small group and most comments were top so that folks needing help could find the info. There were rarely comments more than 2 layers deep.
I have been an avid participant in many programming subreddits, and I can confidently say; This place (Lemmy) feels like the beginning of something I can call home as well. I will gladly start supporting fellow programmers with their questions and problems once I feel settled.
I haven't been here much since I joined last week, but one thing I noticed is I've barely seen any typos on Lemmy. While I definitely don't mind seeing the occasional typo, the number of spelling mistakes was getting annoying, and it's gotten progressively worse over the last year or so.
I think people here might be more conscious of what they post, due to the relatively low quantity of things being posted here. On larger platforms, what you write is more likely to be overlooked, so people care less.
My autocorrect on my Galaxy s22+ is actually a detriment to me... It constantly changes "me" to "Mr" or "MT" and dumb shit like that.. I spend more time correcting 'autocorrects' than typing text.. Why is it so bad suddenly??
What are the reasons if you don't mind me asking? I write in 3 languages on the same mobile keyboard and it does a fantastic job correcting my spelling.
Edit: Yep you get an automatic 1 upvote. So that means people here are also "Downvote the question and upvote the answer" type. Can y'all stop this please?
In my experience as a fellow polyglot, Google's autocorrection is good most of the time, and horribly unusable once in a while. At one point it attempted to correct every single word in a sentence.
I can't describe how much that nonsense drives me up the wall. You have to go out of your way to put that space there and yet there's a non-trivial amount of people who do that. So much effort into wilfully making a mistake, over and over! It's even worse than people who say, "arrive to." And you can't tell me that the clowns doing this don't know what they're doing is wrong. They've definitely seen printed text before, whether it's a book or even just other people's comments, and none of it has that extra space.
I think many of the typos were on purpose. The idea was to get engagement and telling OP that they misspelled something was engagement. It's "algorithm think"
It's so good because a lot of people have been waiting for a viable alternative to Reddit for half a decade or longer. It's non-corporate internet, the way it should be.
I had a lovely conversation with a 19 yr old. He kind of reminded me of myself, only growing up in this crazy time. He was really thoughtful about his experiences. Any one here now is probably a touch more mindful, but we can all slip and be dumb or even bad people, and when there's more people, it's easier to do, especially when there are people who are sad or mad or whatever.
It's about perspective, I think. A 19-year-old is technically a young adult, but is a "grown up" to a small child and a kid to an older adult. I feel like that 18-early 20s-ish range is some weird gray area that seriously depends on maturity level. I've met some very wise people in that age range who are far more adult than literal adults I've known, but I've also met some very, very immature straight-up children in that age range as well.
Then again, maybe that's all ages? Hmm...
Editing to add: This is my first comment on here. I can see myself settling in and getting comfortable in this new space. I'm happy to have possibly found a new home. I'll miss rif though.
It doesn't wear off. I fell off a skateboard when I was 59, only the torn rotator cuff (and 1 year of painful rehab) let me know I shouldn't have tried going down that hill...
Second this. Older guy once told me and it always stuck since.
"I've always mentally felt 18, but my body tells me otherwise."
I still get excited over childish things, and sometimes try to participate and wonder how I used to do some of these said things back then. Paintball is still fun and I can keep up, but I definitely feel it the next day.
It's not an age thing, It's the same reason the internet generally got toxic after a time people who aren't passionate about things take over and drown out the high effort contributers
I think there's a difference between typos and the grammar of someone learning the language.
Meaning that you can usually differentiate between a native speaker of your language typing hastily and not bothering to correct themselves of clean up, vs a new person learning your language speaking in a generally broken manner. I think by typos OP was referring to the first case, and was probably not accusing ESL learners for having imperfect grammar.
Don't underestimate me I can do both. May be he did discriminate though.
Better point would be to speak about argument being more constructed and than one sentence on lemmy compared to reddit ?!
As long as there are no well-known apps on any app store, there are going to be less kids, since they probably don't want to go through GitHub.
I find most of them are somewhat afraid of downloading apks from websites they might not use often.
I’m using TestFlight and it’s incredibly simple. A kid could definitely get the apps on ios. But I think kids just have no reason to care about this stuff. They just want a website where their friends are.
I forget that most "kids" (Idk 20 and down maybe a few years older) only know the internet and technology via Facebook and android/iPhone respectively.
I scroll on my phone PLENTY, I'm not judging, but I can't imagine not having a desktop or laptop at least.
wefwef does look cool. As someone who was weird enough to use the old.reddit interface on my phone and be fine with it, I'm pretty happy with the Lemmy mobile design being a step up, but something more slick is welcome too. I appreciate the browser conveniences like bookmarks, reloading, opening in a new tab, and fuller control of privacy related features such as location access, lack of background activity and mic access.
As a geek myself (or so I like to think), I disagree.
I've worked and been friends with, for example, people from creative areas, and it's definitelly a much greater whole than the sum of the parts when you put people with such different ways of thinking together.
There are some quite massive blind spots in the typical geek-style way of looking at and going about things, IMHO.
I suspect that there is some other factor, maybe something that most geeks have but which is not only geeks who have it. Tentativelly I would say some kind of drive to create/make/contribute.
Enjoy it while it lasts. In no time in your favorite community there will be homework help types of questions as well as those lazy requests for recommendations. "I want to read a book with X vibes." Not to mention the troll posting on science-related things like "If you are what you eat, will I turn into an eggplant if I eat an eggplant?" Actually, it would be nice if Reddit just recovered and those types of users stayed there. This is so chill without all that stuff.
Know-it-alls who treat everyone like they're stupid. Sometimes it feels like everyone is clamouring to look like the smartest person in the room. Can we just talk to each other like friends instead of turning everything into a competition?
People not understanding sarcasm. It might come with the territory of semi-anonymity, but there's probably some overlap with assuming everyone is dumber than you too. There's a reason why /s became popular on Reddit specifically.
General toxicity. It's actually gotten better in recent years. It got pretty weird in those peak anti-woke years though
I don't care what age users are. Just treat others with respect and I'll be cool.
Coming from someone who was your age before you were born: you do you.
'Age' is mostly just a matter of experience and perspective anyways. I could be as old as earth itself but lack the experience to know any better. On the other hand, you could have a better perspective on things (compared to me) because you have been through a lot, or is more thoughtful and reflective about things.
This is the key. I know older people who act like they're in their twenties, and 30 year olds who act like curmudgeonly old men. My girlfriend's grandfather decided almost overnight that he was an old man and suddenly began to act the part.
I dont know, it feels like reddit still and it isnt much about age. Pseudointelligents are present, braggers present, ad-hominem enthusiasts present, fingerprinting my machine to death most likely present, i still fear getting banned for speaking my mind as in all english-language spaces so it will probably be my first and last post on this website if not for the omnipresent abusive and constantly angry mods on every community oriented site i had posted on that bullied me for me being me and high functioning but still autism
Mixed feelings, but gatekeeping quality destroyers works, thats my experience and objective knowledge that it works, and some spaces have lower demographics by age than this place but are the cozy village with admin that doesnt exploit it. Its not about age its about maturity
Lets sit and watch what is going to hatch of this site, my feelings are mixed
I don't think that's the problem. I think it's mostly because it still has way less people (easier to mod), and also it doesn't show user karma, so there's no incentive to karma farm.
I personally think the technical barrier of entry into the fediverse is already enough. There will be some teenagers who prefer mature spaces, and being above a certain age isn't a guarantee for the quality of their contribution.
There's going to be Sync for Lemmy soon. Maybe in a month.
I'm currently using WefWef on Android and it's the best Lemmy app I've used so far but it's a little weird to use an iOS app on android. It's definitely driving my engagement up though
It's one thing to not have kids of your own and want to talk about it with other people, it's another to call kids and their parents slurs just because they didn't follow your way of life.
New here on Lemmy. Is there an age restriction that could help keep the insufferable kids out? (not that any age restrictions really work online, but still) Also, I have no idea if this post will even work because this is the first time commenting on this site.
I guess that depends of how you learn it.
In France the English teaching is very lacking and we often have to learn it from films, TV or other media. So spelling is laborious.
I'm actually an Engineer by trade, a profession which is heavy on the whole precision and completness (try designing a bridge that won't fall when built with incomplete or unclear specs) and in my profession we really don't care that much about correct spelling but do care massivelly about the clarity of the content.
Not saying that wanting better spelling isn't valid, rather saying that its some people's pet-peeve rather than an essential requirement for clear communication.
(Also I'm a non-native english speaker, been speaking and writting it for almost 4 decades, actually lived for over a decade in Britain, have tested as having a larger vocabulary than even most native english speakers and still make tons of spelling mistakes - especially around double consonants - and gramatical ones - misusing "in" and "on" being the most common one - which isn't helped by me knowing 7 languages most of which have different, somtimes contradictory, spelling and grammar rules - and I doubt I'll ever get it as right as the native speakers)
Agree. But it's not kids, it's stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole. Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down. I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I think you‘re onto something. I read a lot of comments of people thinking the fediverse is too complicated to deal with and while I disagree - but also think it has issues - there does seem to be a barrier of entry for a good portion of people in the form of „inconvenience.“ So whoever is here really wants to be here and not just be an anonymous arse. I don‘t think you gotta be particularly smart, you gotta step out of your comfort zone.
Hmm this is also a good point. I've been explaining to redditors that Lemmy is not that complicated and only takes a couple minutes to get started. But reading this, now I'm hoping Lemmy can find the balance between number of active users and quality of content. I'm wondering if my spreading the word on reddit was a bad idea.
Maybe the "work" required to make the jump to Lemmy will be enough to keep lower quality content (for whatever reason) at bay for a bit longer, though. Of course, it won't last forever. All we can do is make our communities good spaces from the get-go and try to maintain them carefully as we grow.
I think the way Lemmy works (wrt federations) makes this less of an issue. Eventually people who like the way things used to be will primarily use oldhead instances that only federate with other oldhead instances. Lemmy.world will end up feeling just like Reddit (more or less) but there will always be spaces for other communities.
I think it‘s good to grow. Lemmy (or the Fediverse, I suppose?) should be as inclusive, convenient, and engaging as can be. It has only just started (in my opinion), we‘ll see how it goes. I like it here so far, feels like people are less prone to jump at your throat for voicing a (harmless) opinion.
Which part of it is supposed to be complicated? I've seen this argument many times, and while I'm still trying to figure out the user interface(s), the whole idea is pretty basic
Yes, this exactly. I'm starting to suspect that either someone very misinformed or someone with an agenda started spreading this rumor.
It just takes one person to reaffirm that it really is "too much work to switch" and "you aren't lazy for not trying" to keep a lot of folks in place.
This kept me off Lemmy until the blackout. I was interested prior to that, but so many people said it was complicated, I figured I'd look into it at some vague point in the future when I had time to untangle the fediverse. Then the baclout happened, and what do you know I had time, and lo and behold it was easy. I'm now a bit annoyed I was dissuaded for so long based on BS about it being complicated.
I just had to find an instance (or "site") that allowed sign-ups and register. My first account was on Kbin since it seemed less buggy on mobile. I feel like they think something's complicated just because it's on a website, or because there are multiple options.
It’s not rocket science but if we’re being honest about it, it’s not exactly an easy concept either. Going from centralised to decentralised for a social network is not an easy idea especially when one isn’t familiar with federation.
For example, at first I was confused because I’d browse a community on lemmy.ml, I’d want to hit subscribe, but then my account is on lemmy.world.
The fact that the website “moves” while I’m reading a post, doesn’t help either.
I had to get a better grip with defederation too. So, on one instance you see 4 comments, but another instance has 5. Because one of the instances doesn’t federate (at least that’s how I understand it now). Or maybe it’s just lag?
Anyway what I’m getting at is I understand why people say it’s complicated and I for one wouldn’t have bothered to get familiar with these concepts if reddit wasn’t going kaboom.
I can‘t tell you since I also disagree. I did basically the same thing I did on Reddit, I only got thrown off seeing multiple „subs“ with the same name.
Some people complained how complicated „explanations“ are. I saw these types of comments on the Reddit Alternatives sub.
I would guess the whole "federation" part. It can be confusing for non tech minded people to try and understand distributed sites. They might not understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml while both being lemmy are not the same site.
Getting one’s head around the concept of instances is hard for some people who aren’t used to dealing with tech beyond the basic social platforms.
Is it one social media platform, or is it a bunch of individual ones? The fact that the answer is “it depends” is confusing. Especially when you get into defederation and cross-platform interaction.
Very true. I often make the mistake of thinking that if something makes sense to me pretty quickly, it will be just as quick for others.
We should remember that those of us here now are more likely to be uniquely interested in this tech and thus more able to wrap our heads around these concepts without being deterred. We could always do a better job making it accessible for beginners who don’t benefit from the same background.
I'm also a bit confused by it being 'complex'. I created an account (I chose .world as it had world in the name, as it turned out that was a great decision lol), you log in, click on 'all' and sort by top/day you've essentially got 'Reddit', or am I missing something lol.
It was the worst thing to witness on reddit. A post with tens of thousands of likes and only a handfull of comments
I boosted from 1k karma to 20k by searching 'pun' on every top joke each day for a week.
It's enough that good/bad posts get boosted up/down by votes without them generating Karma.
Intelligent answers aren't always the most popular...
Reddit karma wasn't about popularity or intelligence. It was about who got there first. If you shotgun enough comments into brand new threads your karma will skyrocket.
Also, making comments on the top comments. Plus that's the only way for new replies to have visibility once a thread has over ~1000 replies.
When IRC was entirely people on command line clients that existed on *nix. But that has changed with the ease of use of clients for Windows, and then eventually web clients.
Not just fewer kids. But fewer conservatives too.
Gosh, I love it here.
Conservatives love having corporate masters, so they're all staying on reddit.
You know, it's so funny (though obviously not in an enjoyable way per se) how those folks are so selective and picky about freedom. Like freedom is OK when it's the freedom to enter a supermarket without a mask, but it's not OK when it's the freedom to express your gender. And as in this example, when it comes to corporate masters...
Don't you just love capitalism? And don't you just loooooove capitalists? It's honestly frightening how reminiscent it is to the way the fascists took power in 1930s Germany.
And by the way, I'm noticing a parallel with how much they not only embrace conservative evangelical Christendom, but also act like it's the epitome of freedom and liberty - the American Dream, if you will. If you attend one of the US's most notorious fundie schools, you're not allowed to stay up late, mingle with the opposite gender too much, attend dances, or be pretty much anything other than cishet (and implicitly, cishet white male). The irony of how said school is named "LIBERTY" University never seems to die on me.
Conservatives love giving lip service to freedom, but they hate anyone actually exercising their freedom.
Basically they only care about appearances and are devoid of any actual substance. That's why they scream "virtue signaling" so much. Since they have no real virtue, they can't conceive of anyone else having any either.
I think you need to consider the immense capability of humans for self-deceit, false logic and just think and act driven by emotion and then post-hoc using thinking to fit some explanation for it.
Also there are way more people who never learned to think in a structured way than there are people who have, plus even the former can be subtly
sawedswayed by their own wants, needs and fears (it mostly happen at the level of interpreting things with many possible interpretations and our judgment of the likelihood of various explanations where there are various possibilities, in my experience).My point being that you can't really "read" them as thinking things through and then knowingly choosing to deceive: I think that at least the ones who just parrot that stuff do not at all internally operate like that.
Sounds like a win-win for everyone.
Impossible: everybody being happy will make the ones who like to see others miserable unhappy.
(On a more serious note, I suspect it's related to the Paradox of Intollerance)
Truth social. Lol.
Truth Social is for conservatives that need more oppression than they get on reddit.
Moving to Truth Social is just trading one corporate master for an even bigger corporate master.
well not entirely. We seem to have a migration of r/conservative here. I looked. It is discretely awful.
Last time I looked at it, liberals were graffitiing all over it.
A lot of the political discussion I’ve read on here has also been pretty well thought out. I feel like people are taking time to explain their perspective more and even if in general it’s been more left leaning there is definitely more nuance. I was surprised by the quality of some of the discussion around the end of affirmative action.
Fewer conservatives, yes. If it wasn't for the harcore tankies and trolls it would really be perfect. But it's very close, much better than Reddit.
based
I’m a teenage FOSS enthusiast and I’m of the opinion that there are a lot more of us here than you seem to all think.
not speaking for OP but when I think about not wanting "kids" around, I mean immature people. I'm looking to be part of something like the reddit prior to them buying Alien Blue.
Agree. I suspect that the UX challenge of the Fediverse as well as the fact that you'd largely only migrate here if you're ideologically displeased with the admins means that people on this site skew more mature.
The people on here at the moment are the same kind of people that exclusively used old.reddit.com on desktop.
I’m gonna ruin it so fast
Booyah high five! Glad you're here
As a fellow teenager and a FOSS enthusiast, Linux user and Linux tinkerer and hobbyist, I'm glad to see there are more people my age getting into the FOSS space.
Same same, it is mostly the matter of your FOSS knowledge, if you were a FOSS nerd you would most likely to switch from reddit in some way or another... (16 btw)
Same, also 16, and the 'mentally kids' excuse is more insulting than they may have realised.
I am not a teenager, but I think younger people are generally pretty fucking cool.
Yeah, yall are immature, so what, compared to old people when they were your age, y'all are so MUCH COOLER.
Seriously, on every metric, I don't understand how you can shit on young people these days. They are just an improvement on us.
There are dozens of us!
Much more than dozens haha
how do you do, fellow adults?
my back hurts
I have a headache
I sneezed too hard and now I have a sharp pain in my neck
I got my socks on and now I need a lie down
... Back in those days we'd tie an onion on our belt
Had to be a brown onion as the Kaiser took all our white onions
my muscles ache
We do a bit of adultery
My knees ='(
MY LEG
Pretty good today. Hope you too
Just had my yearly colonoscopy
Where's the porn?
Lemmy is so good right now because there's no commercialization here.
My ublock has been at a constant "0" on this site since I've started. A youtube tab will have over a hundred by the end of a 10 minute video.
And hopefully never will be. It seems like the people hosting instances aren't in it for the money. Particularly the *.world guys have other fediverse projects big enough that they could've done something like, say, add ads to it.
The .world sites are being financed by a patreon and other donations. They even make their finances public every few months.
This is what's so great about the Fediverse! Not only do most servers make their finances public, but a lot of them can be fiscally hosted by 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Which means that they can not only receive tax-deductible donations from users, but they can also apply for grants and receive donations from charity funds. Was kinda shocked the degree to which this happens setting up my small Mastodon server lol.
The reasons to develop it also are ideological and not ecological ones.
please don't randomly start some ageism crap suddenly now please. the vibes are good because we collectively experience self-efficacy against the corporate super power that is reddit. All people should feel welcome on lemmy
I disagree. Terrible take. It's never wise to discount, alienate, or exclude our youth. Growth is the name of the game and they're the ones who are going to be ushering in hopefully a better future. Who will they learn from if not us? You want them stewing with each other?
No. We maintain whatever nebulous internet "culture" we like and establish rules. Anyone, young or old, who doesn't adhere can suck eggs. That way young people learn how to act and we can hear them tell us about all the ways we need to better society.
Truly I believe that the children who develop during this time of overstimulation and rapid technological advancement will emerge maybe a bit... maladapted but better than us. Humans can be so resilient especially under supportive circumstances. Our intelligence is adaptive. So if you want to make a great internet community, maintain your respect for our kids.
For me, It's the lack of advertising. Especially the constant guerilla advertising and flash marketing done in the larger subs.
At this point I'm just so burnt out on the constant advertisements. It's literally shoved in your face at all times and not only does it make me actively avoid the products but its also exhausting.
Constant advertisements wearing you down? Now there's anti-advertisement spray! Just click here to read our website that totally isn't astroturfing. You too can be without advertising. JUST CLICK HERE!!!
/S
Anti-advertisment, apply directly to the forehead.
eyes.
Honestly though, if there was an anti-advertisement spray that worked I would buy it lol.
"Hello, I'm the CEO of anti-advertisement spray. Please dm me and I'll personally check on the status of your order!"
“Hello, I’m the ceo of Anti-Advertisement spray. After 5 long hard years in development, we’re here to talk about this stuff and shove this product down your throats. AMA!”
1.5k upvotes, people fawning over the person, stupid gold and all the stupid badges attached to the post…. FFS.
..."Barbie", opening only in theaters July 21st.
It's refreshing.
For me it is lack of commercial interests (ads hidden in post), lack of bots, and lack of "funny meme and jokes' posts.
This is it for me. The Pavlovian posting and upvoting of shitty jokes in every. single. thread. I haven't bothered with reddit's comment section in years because of it. Here, the comments so far seem chill and appropriate for the posts.
The Narwhal bacons at midnight, fellow hydrohomie
The same shitty jokes at that, over and over and over again.
Agreed. On top of this I noticed a pretty hard decline in Reddit once the CCP bought a portion of reddit. Keeping business out of Lemmy will keep it honest for sure.
We can always make funny memes
i'd rather have quality content though.
Don't hold the Ads too high. If server costs for lemmy instances become too expensive, Admins might have to resort to ads and I would argue that reddits ads are way better than most intrusive web apps
I think it's more just because we're early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
We're building something here - and right now, for some it's a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn't just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)
Admins go bad, already some of the instances I'm on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.
But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can't go far before we leave... What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we're missing out on content elsewhere.
And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We're going to face difficult times, but it's a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn't start or end with a reddit clone.
And I think that's why we care - because this time is different. It can't go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it's built from all of us
This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital
Yes, and because there are some little hurdles in the signup process. Having to select an instance isn't really that big of a deal, but it will actually stop quite a few people.
The people who do make it through care or are invested enough to join and are less likely to shit the place up. It's a self-selection process.
Well put, almost made me feel inspired till I remembered we're just nerds on the internet hahahahaha
The internet was made for nerds to be on it.
Yeah, sometimes on reddit I'd be talking to someone and realize oh... this person is probably 14 or something.
Its always weird to me when I realize not everyone online is ~30 years old.
And male.
Yeah, or first year college kids who have figured out how the world should work.
And it’s not restricted to eli5
anyone that thinks random defederations are good for the users.
Do kids really impact the level of conversations on social platforms? Many adults are just as immature.
Great post. Lemmy right now reminds me of Reddit 15-16 years ago. Mostly tech workers or tech hobbyists who know far more than an average person and thus aren't put off by something new and different. I don't think Lemmy is very complicated as a concept and it boggles my mind that people are saying "making a new account on Lemmy.world or Kbin.social is too complicated for normal people." Yet I see it written all the time, sometimes here but mostly on reddit. And who knows; maybe the latter is a disinformation campaign since we know reddit pulls sneaky shit like that all the time (and targeting Lemmy, like with the warnings they placed on links at one point).
Lemmy's barriers to entry also somewhat remind me of early Facebook after they expanded to several universities. You needed to have an email address from one of those univerisities in order to create an account. So, not so much self selection in that scenario but another gate to keep people out.
I can respect Tildes' decision to become invite-only (with a very limited number of invites) for that reason. Lemmy, I think, is prioritizing growth at the potential cost of future community. Tildes is doing the opposite. I don't think one is necessarily more correct. And, with Lemmy, there are tons of alternatives waiting in the wings. Hopefully a balance can be struck.
I think the real test comes when the first wave of good third party apps are released. Sync, in particular, seems very promising given the developer's reddit app. Anything that can make it easier for people.
Hey I just said I reqllly found your comment really informative and insightful, and albeit I have some vague ideas on how it is part of survivorship bias, i can't quite tell what you refer to?
What I'm talking about is mostly negative bias so I might be wrong
Thanks for your time :)
Thank you so much for the follow up, bridged my gap in understanding fully
I think the influence on Reddit was deeper than a lot of people have considered. The hivemind was so strong it made it difficult to have decent and useful discussion, even the puns that muddied down nearly every post's comments achieved that end. The amount of posts I've seen of people feeling much more comfortable actually interacting on Lemmy, in my mind, lends weight to how Reddit wasn't a place for objective dialogue. That's why it felt so adolescent, like sitting at a high school lunch table.
This is like when people in 7th grade say that the 6th graders are sooo immature omg
I don't support age shaming. Let's not be those people.
This is the time before the Eternal September. Enjoy it while you can.
Nice username.
Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
I thought your username was supposed to be theft, but someone stole the "h".
If you want, we can all pretend to be kids just like on /r/teenagers.
That place was so creepy.
I was ther euntil I turned 19, then I stopped being a teen and left the sub. I went back to see what I posted /commented.
Nothing just emptiness, idk how I didn't realise
Typical /r/ teenagers post:
Oh my god I think this girl likes me but idk I might be gay does that make me bi?
This must be such a confusing time to be a kid.
The internet as a whole got sadder / meaner / more unruly when COVID happened. I was on reddit a lot at the time and noticed it immediately.
It’s still like that, but I hope we find a way forward.
The world as a whole...
I'm of the opinion that the two years of COVID driven existential fear and uncertainty around death, of both ourselves and our loved ones, is a global impact that will ripple through behavior for many years. We monkeys all act out our traumas. That's okay, it's part of the healing process and will eventually become a fading memory replaced by better ones, births, new relationships, triumphs and laughter.
Meh, lets not.
In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they've come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I'm of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone's intellect, wisdom, and insight. I'm in my mid 30s and have a master's degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who've lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy's narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that's what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
OP I think you spelled idiots wrong.
The Crow cawed that Lemmy is strong,
Since no kids have yet come along
But the teens disagree
All ages've stupidity!
I think you spelled idiots wrong
The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.
Lemon Rick sounds like a shady 70's drug dealer who shoots porn as a side hustle.
Oh, there are some of us idiots here too.
Oi, who are you calling an idiot? My gram used to tell me, that I'm the most handsome/inteligent boy in the world.
Maybe the OP refers to the "mentally kids" people, not just ordinary kids. And I'm sure glad to see civilized and mature conversations for once, not just nonsense spewing trolls responding with "nice argument, but ur mum" types
When I was a kid I thought grown ups were annoying, when I was in my 20s I thought teenagers were annoying, in my 30s I think people in their 20s are annoying. People will always have something to complain about others. “Kids” is just a different group for different people.
I would imagine a high proportion of people so easy to leave Reddit found it easy because they remember leaving digg.
Anyone younger than that are just bloody sensible
Some of us are old enough to remember when social media sites that were "too big to die" died. We've been burned before, so we're making plans before that happens.
You'll never take Tom, my first SM crush, away from me.
I only joined Reddit five years ago. Leaving Reddit turned out to be pretty easy because I had other things to occupy my time with. I have a feeling that it's because I was never that attached to reddit to begin with.
I can relate to this. I think I've been on Reddit for about 6 years. I probably had a bit of an addiction but I used to be pretty serious into forums and I have already learned how to disconnect from internet communities more than a decade ago.
Should note that the 'addiction' part was only fueled by my favorite third party app "Joey".
I'm only going back to reddit here and there so I can use Joey till the end. It's like going back to an old house you still have the keys to and wandering around thinking of the memories.
I started redditing about 8 years back. After digg.
Leaving reddit is hard but I have generally enjoyed forums and lemmy is a fun new experience I haven't had in a while.
If anything, in 10 years I can do the whole 'I was here at the start' thing on the younglings.
Old Slashdotter here. I skipped Fark and Digg and went straight to Reddit. I'm very happy to be here in the Fediverse/Lemmy world now.
I don't remember exactly how I came to Reddit, but I know I'm in the 13-year club. I remember when all the Digg users came over and remember they're being a lot of anger and memes about it. But I've been around long enough to where moving to a different platform doesn't phase me in the slightest. In fact, I'm really enjoying this feeling of a reinvigorated community.
Haha I don't know what Digg is, but I came from 9gag to 8yrs of Reddit to now Lemmy.
hot take but nobody under 18 should be allowed on any form of social media or internet forum
but there's no way to enforce that. better solution is to just get rid of all social media
Joke's on you, I'm a dog.
Everyone on the internet is a dog unless proven otherwise.
I mean...woof.
Well, I am actually in fact, a banana! 100% not a dog over here....
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Joke's on you, I'm a sandwich
Oh, that's perfect, cuz I am really hungry
The amount of generational hate and is really ridiculous… I don't consider myself a kid with 21, but seriously, I'm happy if younger people join here and also embrace this space. And just acting as if everyone of a specific age would be the same is… oof
Enjoy while it lasts, Eventually everything turns to shit
I remember shortly after the death of digg rage comics being peak humor and suddenly an influx of kids not understanding how to make a rage comic killing that sub.
It reminds me of the day the internet died, when so many new AOL users overwhelmed the forums at the time and killed all the etiquette that had formed up to that point. Internet been stagnant for longer than it should have been. I’m excited to see where things go now.
We are still in the Eternal September... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eternal is in the name for a reason
It's eternal for a reason
Lots of kids, but the mental age of the user base is all adults (for now)
Maturity really isn't the same as age: plenty of legally adult people (many already so for decades) around who are anything but mature individuals.
That said, as others here I think the absence of the subtle pressures derived from commercialization and profit-seeking make most of the difference.
Also, I've been thinking about the possibiility that both those already in Lemmy before and the Reddit refugees who came in recently, are at the most principled end of the spectrum compared with those still in Reddit (whose principles on the subject of ultra-authoritarian top-down imposition as done in Reddit clearly aren't strong enough to make them try something else), possibly also more confortable with change. This might make the crowd here at the moment a self-selected bunch leaning significantly more towards a certain psychological profile than the average which in turn (or so is my theory) affects the dominant tone of discussions here.
We are all early adopters here. They are typically more engaged with the product.
That is a really good point which I hadn't thought about.
It doesn't even really matter what the common traits are of the self-selcting group of people who are here in the early days. They exist and therefore that group is more alike each other than at a broader platform like at Reddit. Even if we are all objectively ignorant jerks, because we are similar we will feel that the people we are talking with are decent and smart because they have similar strengths and blindspots to ourselves (think of any community that is repellent to you. The people in there all seem to think one another are wonderful.)
Let's be real, kids don't care about/understand what the API changes are and are on the TikTok
I suspect that one of the reasons Lemmy's texts are longer, meatier, and more thoughtful is the age of the users. My gut tells me that we're an older audience that doesn't need to dump the usual social media BS - hasty comments filled with unsubstantiated arguments. Everyone has an opinion and should be heard and respected. As a Reddit refugee, I feel Lemmy provides such space, and that's what I enjoy most. Like many others whose profiles match mine, once you get past the initial confusion (where should I register, what app should I use, where can I comment) and get comfortable with the jargon, you feel more encouraged to participate in discussions. So far, I've been pleased with the civil environment of the discussions, as most users are able to express their thoughts in a relaxed and non-toxic manner. Honestly, I'd encourage anyone who has been just lurking to participate and share their thoughts.
To add to that: I think it's actually worthwhile to write longer texts here compared to reddit because of two reasons: 1) people here want Lemmy to succeed so they put more time and effort in to get things going, and 2) it's more likely for that text to be seen by others because there aren't 2.000 other commenters but maybe 20.
True. The sense of anticipation of a new home in which to settle seems genuine. Also, I agree that a smaller group where users actually read the posts and interact with each other validates the purpose of investing the time to share one's views with people who are actually interested.
This specific issue is why I pivoted to mostly lurking Reddit – outside of the hobby subs, discussion of any relevance to the content posted is pretty hard to come by (like fucking askreddit??????how is that such a circlejerk of one-liners)
I have to either dig 10+ replies in to a tangentially related top-level comment, or scroll past the shit jokes and hope there's something before hitting downvoted troll bedrock. This could well be a scale issue that we'll see in time, but hopefully enough people can keep setting up and joining instances to mitigate it
My only concern is that Google doesn't seem to be indexing lemmy pages. So even if we add content that might be helpful it is not getting any screentime.
To add to that, searching isn't as simple as "best laptops reddit" if the knowledge is spread across the fediverse. That's something I'd be interested to see
That seems like a problem that search providers will have a strong incentive to solve from their end as and when finding those fediverse results becomes essential.
Your second point is exactly why I rarely made much of an effort in the more popular posts. I was a regular commenter with detailed comments on the dog training sub because it was a small group and most comments were top so that folks needing help could find the info. There were rarely comments more than 2 layers deep.
I have been an avid participant in many programming subreddits, and I can confidently say; This place (Lemmy) feels like the beginning of something I can call home as well. I will gladly start supporting fellow programmers with their questions and problems once I feel settled.
Hiiiiiii guys! ~
I'm new heeereeeee! Am 12/f/cali looking for cutey cutey fweends!!!!! Uwu
No kids? I am a kid
I'm emotionally 15 does that count?
I haven't been here much since I joined last week, but one thing I noticed is I've barely seen any typos on Lemmy. While I definitely don't mind seeing the occasional typo, the number of spelling mistakes was getting annoying, and it's gotten progressively worse over the last year or so.
I think people here might be more conscious of what they post, due to the relatively low quantity of things being posted here. On larger platforms, what you write is more likely to be overlooked, so people care less.
How do you even make any typos with all the autocorrect nowadays is beyond me.
My autocorrect on my Galaxy s22+ is actually a detriment to me... It constantly changes "me" to "Mr" or "MT" and dumb shit like that.. I spend more time correcting 'autocorrects' than typing text.. Why is it so bad suddenly??
I was wondering if it was just me. My Gboard autocorrect has had a stroke the last couple weeks.
Autocorrect is the cause of many of my typos
Autocorrect catches all my typos, and for that I’m eternally grapefruit
I personally don't use auto correct for a couple reason, so typos still happen from time to time.
What are the reasons if you don't mind me asking? I write in 3 languages on the same mobile keyboard and it does a fantastic job correcting my spelling.
Test comment
Edit: Yep you get an automatic 1 upvote. So that means people here are also "Downvote the question and upvote the answer" type. Can y'all stop this please?
In my experience as a fellow polyglot, Google's autocorrection is good most of the time, and horribly unusable once in a while. At one point it attempted to correct every single word in a sentence.
As someone with dyslexia I definitely still find a way sometimes.
My pet peeve is when people put a space before the full stop or the exclamation mark. Something like this !
You monster, how could you ?
I can't describe how much that nonsense drives me up the wall. You have to go out of your way to put that space there and yet there's a non-trivial amount of people who do that. So much effort into wilfully making a mistake, over and over! It's even worse than people who say, "arrive to." And you can't tell me that the clowns doing this don't know what they're doing is wrong. They've definitely seen printed text before, whether it's a book or even just other people's comments, and none of it has that extra space.
Ya bro u damn rite finalysumeonre has the guts to say it. I hope dis comunity stay crispy
Nah. I still make lots of typos.
I think many of the typos were on purpose. The idea was to get engagement and telling OP that they misspelled something was engagement. It's "algorithm think"
It's so good because a lot of people have been waiting for a viable alternative to Reddit for half a decade or longer. It's non-corporate internet, the way it should be.
I had a lovely conversation with a 19 yr old. He kind of reminded me of myself, only growing up in this crazy time. He was really thoughtful about his experiences. Any one here now is probably a touch more mindful, but we can all slip and be dumb or even bad people, and when there's more people, it's easier to do, especially when there are people who are sad or mad or whatever.
Is that considered a kid? Just curious about todays perception. When I was at that age it was considered young adult.
It's about perspective, I think. A 19-year-old is technically a young adult, but is a "grown up" to a small child and a kid to an older adult. I feel like that 18-early 20s-ish range is some weird gray area that seriously depends on maturity level. I've met some very wise people in that age range who are far more adult than literal adults I've known, but I've also met some very, very immature straight-up children in that age range as well.
Then again, maybe that's all ages? Hmm...
Editing to add: This is my first comment on here. I can see myself settling in and getting comfortable in this new space. I'm happy to have possibly found a new home. I'll miss rif though.
Hmm I kinda typed that in after reading further down.
Imo, it depends on experience.
more often than not, even highly intelligent people just lack exposure to certain things, situations.
I'd rather talk to that 19 yr old than many many many many many people who are not internet strangers to me (:
Yes.. we. Are all. Adults..🤫
Totally. Yup.
Or passing some sort of turing test looking for adulthood instead of ai.
Reminds me of Reddit around 2010.
Would you not consider people in their mid twenties kids?
I'm in my early 30s and still feel like a child most of the time
It doesn't wear off. I fell off a skateboard when I was 59, only the torn rotator cuff (and 1 year of painful rehab) let me know I shouldn't have tried going down that hill...
Second this. Older guy once told me and it always stuck since.
"I've always mentally felt 18, but my body tells me otherwise."
I still get excited over childish things, and sometimes try to participate and wonder how I used to do some of these said things back then. Paintball is still fun and I can keep up, but I definitely feel it the next day.
✋?
And no repost bots. Reddit top posts are so filled with trash reposts I have seen the 69420 times like I am looking back my primary school homework
https://media.tenor.com/HEMQmYHww6MAAAAM/borat-borat-very-nice.gif
I loved reddit but there were definitely times where it felt like I was in a high school cafeteria.
It's not an age thing, It's the same reason the internet generally got toxic after a time people who aren't passionate about things take over and drown out the high effort contributers
Yeah and typo come from non native speaker too. Lemmy in not a american only thing
I think there's a difference between typos and the grammar of someone learning the language.
Meaning that you can usually differentiate between a native speaker of your language typing hastily and not bothering to correct themselves of clean up, vs a new person learning your language speaking in a generally broken manner. I think by typos OP was referring to the first case, and was probably not accusing ESL learners for having imperfect grammar.
Don't underestimate me I can do both. May be he did discriminate though. Better point would be to speak about argument being more constructed and than one sentence on lemmy compared to reddit ?!
As long as there are no well-known apps on any app store, there are going to be less kids, since they probably don't want to go through GitHub. I find most of them are somewhat afraid of downloading apks from websites they might not use often.
Which is normally a really good thing...
I’m using TestFlight and it’s incredibly simple. A kid could definitely get the apps on ios. But I think kids just have no reason to care about this stuff. They just want a website where their friends are.
Keep Lemmy weird
I forget that most "kids" (Idk 20 and down maybe a few years older) only know the internet and technology via Facebook and android/iPhone respectively.
I scroll on my phone PLENTY, I'm not judging, but I can't imagine not having a desktop or laptop at least.
I just use the websites for every social media app, including lemmy. Seems better than apps to me.
wefwef is a progressive web app you can use that's kind of cool
wefwef does look cool. As someone who was weird enough to use the old.reddit interface on my phone and be fine with it, I'm pretty happy with the Lemmy mobile design being a step up, but something more slick is welcome too. I appreciate the browser conveniences like bookmarks, reloading, opening in a new tab, and fuller control of privacy related features such as location access, lack of background activity and mic access.
There are several lemmy apps in development and one on the app store already so that's not gonna last long.
the kids are alright
The internet as a whole was much better when websites and services were not designed to cater to kids.
The internet was good when it's all just geeks
As a geek myself (or so I like to think), I disagree.
I've worked and been friends with, for example, people from creative areas, and it's definitelly a much greater whole than the sum of the parts when you put people with such different ways of thinking together.
There are some quite massive blind spots in the typical geek-style way of looking at and going about things, IMHO.
I suspect that there is some other factor, maybe something that most geeks have but which is not only geeks who have it. Tentativelly I would say some kind of drive to create/make/contribute.
My bad. It was just oversimplification and poor wording. What I meant was the Internet was good when its barrier to entry was higher than today.
Agreed, great to have creative people.
Maybe to rephrase: the Internet was better before the suits arrived.
Enjoy it while it lasts. In no time in your favorite community there will be homework help types of questions as well as those lazy requests for recommendations. "I want to read a book with X vibes." Not to mention the troll posting on science-related things like "If you are what you eat, will I turn into an eggplant if I eat an eggplant?" Actually, it would be nice if Reddit just recovered and those types of users stayed there. This is so chill without all that stuff.
I don’t know man, Reddit was pretty incel and anti kid if you ask me. Can’t be arsed for that vibe no more 🤷🏻♂️
This is fine.
Still?!?
Let them stay there.
Eternal September comes to every platform at some point.
My biggest pet peeves about reddit are probably
Know-it-alls who treat everyone like they're stupid. Sometimes it feels like everyone is clamouring to look like the smartest person in the room. Can we just talk to each other like friends instead of turning everything into a competition?
People not understanding sarcasm. It might come with the territory of semi-anonymity, but there's probably some overlap with assuming everyone is dumber than you too. There's a reason why /s became popular on Reddit specifically.
General toxicity. It's actually gotten better in recent years. It got pretty weird in those peak anti-woke years though
I don't care what age users are. Just treat others with respect and I'll be cool.
What do you mean? I'm 16/f/cali
I wonder how many minors are here masquerading as boomers, shitting on their own generation to fit in?
Huh... I just thought everyone here was just well spoken and kind
I'm 17
Coming from someone who was your age before you were born: you do you.
'Age' is mostly just a matter of experience and perspective anyways. I could be as old as earth itself but lack the experience to know any better. On the other hand, you could have a better perspective on things (compared to me) because you have been through a lot, or is more thoughtful and reflective about things.
This is the key. I know older people who act like they're in their twenties, and 30 year olds who act like curmudgeonly old men. My girlfriend's grandfather decided almost overnight that he was an old man and suddenly began to act the part.
Half of age is perspective.
This has brought quite a funny mental image to me.
A man like this
suddenly turning into this
almost like magic.
Same here, but turning eighteen very soon
Holds up spork
Enjoy it while it lasts.
The deep rock galactic subreddit got overrun by kids and their stupid, shit memes, long live Lemmy!
Rock and Stone!
FOR CARL!!
I'm doing my part!
So this is the right place for a 30+ yo?
I dont know, it feels like reddit still and it isnt much about age. Pseudointelligents are present, braggers present, ad-hominem enthusiasts present, fingerprinting my machine to death most likely present, i still fear getting banned for speaking my mind as in all english-language spaces so it will probably be my first and last post on this website if not for the omnipresent abusive and constantly angry mods on every community oriented site i had posted on that bullied me for me being me and high functioning but still autism Mixed feelings, but gatekeeping quality destroyers works, thats my experience and objective knowledge that it works, and some spaces have lower demographics by age than this place but are the cozy village with admin that doesnt exploit it. Its not about age its about maturity Lets sit and watch what is going to hatch of this site, my feelings are mixed
I'm torn between "hey that's ageism" and "yeah! those younger than me can rot in hell"
I don't think that's the problem. I think it's mostly because it still has way less people (easier to mod), and also it doesn't show user karma, so there's no incentive to karma farm.
Lol my previous comment got deleted. Lemmy.world controlled by a reddit admin?
Edit: legit thought maybe it could be an error but my comment must have hit too close to the mark and was deleted! Lol
Edit 2: deleted comment
I'm not convinced.
man. i hope there would be an age barrier to those or something. i had enough of kids and shitposters. is this heaven
https://imgur.com/a/zMorTCb
I personally think the technical barrier of entry into the fediverse is already enough. There will be some teenagers who prefer mature spaces, and being above a certain age isn't a guarantee for the quality of their contribution.
Download this - I've got plenty spare.
Just discovered wefwef.app and it's definitely driving my engagement. I hope there's going to be some good apps coming out soon.
There's going to be Sync for Lemmy soon. Maybe in a month.
I'm currently using WefWef on Android and it's the best Lemmy app I've used so far but it's a little weird to use an iOS app on android. It's definitely driving my engagement up though
I'm backing and using liftoff! But I come from baconreader and it reminds me of that.
Same, had to install another Lemmy app after Jerboa effed up this morning, Liftoff is quite nice, definitely usable and worth the install.
There's going to be Sync for Lemmy soon. Maybe in a month.
I'm currently using WefWef on Android and it's the best Lemmy app I've used so far but it's a little weird to use an iOS app on android.
More like doomscrollers.
As someone who is 57. GTFO my lawn.
Bitches be like "I hate those elitists assholes" and then post shit like that
Sounds like someone needs a good teabagging followed up with a dab... or are kids not doing that stuff anymore? I don't even know what's hip now.
Pleased to be here.
I’m so happy to find a new community. Looking around quickly this seem like a much better group of people to interact with than reddit.
I can’t express enough how glad I am this place exists and I can be done with reddit forever
I came after Reddit broke Google. Or more correctly: reddit fixed Google, but then broke itself. Dunno about kids.
Agreed. Reddit became horrible once everyone got on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Nope
Statistics say that at least 50% of the internet are bots!
What do statistics say about their distribution on different sites?
Yes, kids are why facebook is a cesspit.
I am 17 so does that count as adult or kid
So exactly how do I subscribe to showerthoughts...for instance. 😁
Obverse summer
Woteva. You litterally sound like an auld man 🤣 I disagree with this...
I do find slightly more mature content over here (though not so much of 'watchitfortheplot')...
Mostly it's just stupid people, lazy people, ignorant people.
There are some here, but it's certainly less than the 95% hit rate of RedTit.
r/childfree was a pretty mean and spiteful place.
It's one thing to not have kids of your own and want to talk about it with other people, it's another to call kids and their parents slurs just because they didn't follow your way of life.
I hope we don't have that here.
Yes, we're no spring chickens
New here on Lemmy. Is there an age restriction that could help keep the insufferable kids out? (not that any age restrictions really work online, but still) Also, I have no idea if this post will even work because this is the first time commenting on this site.
That not nice for non native English speaker (writer). I am guessing you are american by the american centrist view in your comment.
Non-American, not a native speaker either, but how is writing correct spelling American-centrist?
I'm genuinely curious to know.
I guess that depends of how you learn it. In France the English teaching is very lacking and we often have to learn it from films, TV or other media. So spelling is laborious.
I'm actually an Engineer by trade, a profession which is heavy on the whole precision and completness (try designing a bridge that won't fall when built with incomplete or unclear specs) and in my profession we really don't care that much about correct spelling but do care massivelly about the clarity of the content.
Not saying that wanting better spelling isn't valid, rather saying that its some people's pet-peeve rather than an essential requirement for clear communication.
(Also I'm a non-native english speaker, been speaking and writting it for almost 4 decades, actually lived for over a decade in Britain, have tested as having a larger vocabulary than even most native english speakers and still make tons of spelling mistakes - especially around double consonants - and gramatical ones - misusing "in" and "on" being the most common one - which isn't helped by me knowing 7 languages most of which have different, somtimes contradictory, spelling and grammar rules - and I doubt I'll ever get it as right as the native speakers)
There is lemmygrad though
Because of the lack of children there are no discord mods either, paradise manifest
Child reporting for duty SR!
me_irl
Are you my mummy
more mature and thoughtful people here