• TheBannedLemming@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Is the average age of a social media user really that young? Are very young adults and legally speaking children the driving force behind the base of social media? Are even modestly older individuals not willing to try and engage with this developing type of medium?

  • fin@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    I remember when I created my first lemmy account on fediverse on lemmy.ml when I was like 15 or 16. 20 years old now, I’m in the elderly group…

  • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    It’s not over 30? Or on the verge of 40? I see a lotta 40+ memes and sentiments. At least in the communities I frequent.

  • ruuster13@lemmy.zip
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    8 days ago

    Week 1 feels like a ghost town. Week 2 feels like old old Reddit. Week 3 feels like old Reddit. I’m content and there is content.

  • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
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    8 days ago

    Average here feels like 40+

    Even me being 20+, I feel like a kid interrupting adults talking lolz

    I read a lot of “back in my day, there weren’t smartphones” comments whenever the post talks about technology and smartphones, and I feel so left out. I mean, Smartphones have been a part of most of the life I remember. Can’t really remember the world without smartphones.

    Idk what I’m doing here, but reddit banned Tor, so I have no where else to anonymously ask weird questions and rant about life.

    • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

      I was probably older than you are now when you were born. It’s been interesting (in the ancient curse sense of the word) to witness firsthand a world without internet slowly becoming online, advancing, then decaying into the corporate-run AI slop hellscape we’re seeing today.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      back in my day, there weren’t smartphones

      We of the fabled Oregon Trail Generation had the unique experience of an analog childhood and an adulthood in the digital hellscape we all know and love.

      So when we wandered off into the woods for hours, or even once I could borrow a car and head over to a friends’ place? Completely unreachable. The only exception was the house phone at a friend’s place if we were there.

      When I was in college, Wi-Fi was just becoming popular. The equivalent to walking down the sidewalk with your face in your phone was the couple grad student TAs who were busy or nerdy enough to walk between buildings holding their laptop open in front of them. Wi-Fi was not built in of course. It was a PCMCIA card sticking out of the side.

      When we were home or in our dorms, we didn’t sit on our phones, we sat on our PCs! And now decades later I’ve transitioned back to sitting on my PC at home and it’s great, lol.

      My first personal cell phone of any kind was my dad handing me down his old work phone when I finished college and moved a couple hours away. It was a Motorola Startac motherfucker! Look it up and be jealous!

      It’s funny because I’m only in my mid 40s and have very little gray hair. I don’t feel like an old, but I have absolutely hit the point of the “back in my day” attitude. I usually don’t actually say anything unless I see a good joke in it, because that would be cliched and obnoxious.

      I bet there’s something about being the age where you could be a grandparent. There’s something pretty damn wholesome about watching people who are young enough to be your children having their own families and careers and stuff. We had our kid about a decade later than we wanted, so I think my son gets to benefit from me being half chill grandpa and not 100% frantic young parent.

    • 007Ace@lemmy.ca
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      7 days ago

      Smartphones? I remember before cellphones. How about only having to remember 4 digits to call someone? Or… How about just going to their house to see if they wanted to hang out. No phones involved. Haha. I’m 40.

      • frostysauce@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Wow. I’m 44 and I remember the switch from seven digit dialing to ten digits but we already moved past four digits in my area before I was born. Unless you’re talking about the prefix being the same for the whole city, like everything started with 262-XXXX so you only had to remember the four at the end?

        • 007Ace@lemmy.ca
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          7 days ago

          Oh yes, for clarity, the first 3 digits were the same for everyone, so we didn’t have to think about them. Haha, well after the official change from 4 to 7 digits.

    • percent@infosec.pub
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      8 days ago

      Feel free to ask weird questions and rant about life! Our lives were very different 20 years ago, so it’s interesting to learn from the perspectives of other generations.

    • dil@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      im 26, I was a kid with flip phones, I remember dropping my dads in the toilet, I was an early ipad kid basically, needed phone games lol, I rmemeber early iphones and the fake chinese ones with the picture puzzle game, kinda went through a lot of eras growing up, had an xperia play as my first phone in middle school (amazingly didnt regret it even tho any phone + psp wouldve been a far superior combo lol) Ipod touch 4 year or two before is when the appstore was poppingoff with angrybirds, doodle jump, etc.

      • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        I remind my currently 20 something nephew how he would cry crinkly crocodile tears if he wasn’t given a dose of Talking Tom.

      • dil@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        When I hit highschool everyone had smartphones and they were just becoming close to what we have today then. Snapchat was popular, vine, instagram was starting to become the weird arty sht it is now. Iphone started becoming a status symbol in middleschool, im kinda all over the place, but ppl had androids/whatever os wasnt iphone/android for a short period

        • dil@lemmy.zip
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          7 days ago

          ppl blame imessage but the real issue back then was app support, ppl just wanted consistently and everything to work, plus androids tended to have worse quality around the board when uploading even with better hardware think they still have lower limits for apps like tiktok

    • Quik@infosec.pub
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      7 days ago

      u20 here, feels like watching the retirees table at the local pub, just with better informed politics and tech savvy. Very funny, would recommend.

    • ruuster13@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      We speak in metaphor and paradox instead of innuendo. For example: there is a before and after the internet and neither of these periods include the previous 30-40 years.

  • moseschrute@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    Me as Gen Z trying to get all my Gen Z friends to join Lemmy, not very successfully. Though to be fair, I’m basically as old as you can be and still be Gen Z.

    • ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      My introduction is subtle. I text content to people. When they ask me where I get it (it’s happened twice so far), I say Lemmy. They say, “what’s that.” Gives me an opportunity to explain the similarities and differences with (advantages over) Reddit. No takers yet, but it’s coming.

      • isar@lemmy.ml
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        8 days ago

        On Reddit there’s a lot of “lemmy’s too complicated to be adopted by the general public”. Ik we don’t all have the same tech literacy but it doesn’t seem that complicated, like, do you understand emailing? Then you understand most of what lemmy is… (also you don’t even have to understand the intricacies to enjoy your experience there)

        • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
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          8 days ago

          I don’t think its just complexity, its a semi-ghost town if you venture out of the political topics.

          I mean, there was never a GoT community, The Expanse Community, Rick and Morty, Squid Game, or like even a GTA community. Inactive communities with 1 post every 3 month doesn’t count.

          Like this is really just a place to vent about life, and for general everyday discussions, not for topic-specific discussions.

        • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Frankly I think it’s simply that the public doesn’t particularly care to figure it out. As an analogy, people use Windows because that’s just what their computer came with, and therefore saying that Linux is free (as in price) is a meaningless selling point to them. You don’t convince Windows users to switch by saying that Linux is free, you convince them by saying that Linux is more convenient, stable, and less annoying.

          In the same way, you don’t convince the public into using Lemmy by arguing about why open protocols are better. You convince people by saying that Lemmy is basically like Reddit but not overrun by bots and spammers

      • Aneb@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Re:

        No takers yet, but it’s coming.

        I literally have explained the open protocols for social sharing that were released years ago. I tried to tell them that nobody can track you. And the ads they see don’t go to corps but literally no buy in from my friends and family. My sister has a blue sky account and I told her she was part if the Masterdon/Lemmy federation. She just thinks blue sky is a better twitter, for now.

      • Afflictedlife@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        As an ageless fifth dimensional being extending my influence into this world through this rotting meat sack I am confused by both of you as I still recall time as a singularity

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I’m nearly 50, not really sure how it all works. Just glad that I found something other than reddit.

  • M137@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I’m just happy there aren’t any, or at least many, teens and kids here. Reading the comments on Reddit, YouTube and anywhere else where they are is a fucking fever dream of stupidity, ignorance and weirdness. It’s mostly fine here, and it’s a nice break.