I'm glad to be here with the rest of you old fogeys

Me in my 40s

Thats above 20, so you're key demographic and not at all an outlier
- Give them a break. Grandpa doesn't understand memes.
Yeah, this doesn’t make me feel like the Fediverse is full of olds at all. Im old enough to be the average user’s parent.
- Dad?

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.

Watch out! At this rate it’ll feel like enshttfied Reddit by week 5
- do these obvious human accounts think we can't spot them?
- Are you under the opinion that Spez is going to buy out all of the mom's basements and make Lemmy have a public offer?
- upsi
lemmy has 30 K users by now worldwide btw, it started in late 2019 iirc. maybe we can get a million by 2030.

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

My introduction is subtle. I text content to people. When they ask me where I get it (it's happened twice so far), I say Lemmy. They say, "what's that." Gives me an opportunity to explain the similarities and differences with (advantages over) Reddit. No takers yet, but it's coming.
- 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)
- 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.
- i wish there was a useable german instance for the general public.
  discuss.tchncs.de is great but as the name says, rather for techy people
  feddit.org is borderline unusable garbage between political shit-takes (constant bickering and non-constructive arguments) and generally a very non-open mood, it feels to me.
- Same here we playing the long con.

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.

It's okay--we old folks can benefit from having a few younguns around.
Eh, don't sweat it. I'm 41, and I still find myself feeling the same way when my manager is talking.... and he's younger than me. I've been told you reach a point where you just don't care anymore but my supervisor is 52 with two grown children and says she still gets that feeling from time to time, so who knows how true it is.
Now for the "get off my lawn" portion of the reply. I can remember in 1991 my aunt was working for a legal firm and running documents around for them, they needed instant contact so they paid big bucks to have a mobile phone installed in her car. It cost a ridiculous amount per minute to talk on. One day she was talking me to McDonald's and I asked why she had a phone in her car since she couldn't plug it in, after she explained it to me I asked if I could call my dad, she said yes but make it quick. She dialed his number at work and handed me the phone. When he answered I blurted out "hi dad I'm calling from Aunt Juanita's car! Have to be quick, bye" and before she could stop me I hung up the phone.
She called him back to apologize and let him know everything was ok, then handed the phone to me so my dad could lecture me about phone etiquette and tell me to be good for Aunt Juanita.
Also I remember being excited to get to go to the school library to play Oregon trail on the green screen computer and having to swap out 5 inch floppy disks throughout the game to move to the next part.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to take some ibuprofen as all this typing is aggravating my joints. LoL.
- 5 1/4 inches, you heathen. I'm closing in on 50. I am beginning to understand really old people who just let the young ones talk and don't take their advice. Stuff you're supposed to be doing has changed so much, that it is tempting to just do whatever you've been doing all your life. It'll just change again, so why bother.
Early 30 here. Mobile phones only started being accessible when I was like in 5th year of school, smartphones, like proper ones, android/ios - that was closer to my university days. Before that we had different phones with good displays but controlled by buttons, you could play games on those too, but lot simpler ones.
What I'm trying to say, your gen is about the first one to experience "smartphone was here always" vibe.
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.
- Never heard the term Oregon Trail Generation before but immediately knew what it meant. That's a great name.
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.
- 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?
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.
- 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
- I remind my currently 20 something nephew how he would cry crinkly crocodile tears if he wasn't given a dose of Talking Tom.
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.
reminder that not everyone is a westerner. my home village only had internet (adsl) like in 2008 or so
u20 here, feels like watching the retirees table at the local pub, just with better informed politics and tech savvy. Very funny, would recommend.
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.
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.
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.

age: 21 hairline:31 physical age:101

Why do you suppose this is? Are we just the only generation with the minimal tech skills needed to sign up?

Probably less about skill, per se, and more about interest. But the (still very low) barrier to entry probably does weed out a few kids.
- Yeah, I mean I wasn't there for old reddit and I am only on lemmy because of the reddit protests, but I couldn't see any of my classmates using anything that's on the fediverse.
- Why would our age group be the only ones interested?
Because we say shit like "why do you suppose this is"
- Got em
I doubt it. People don't mention when they're young (except in some specific cases like this). Young people can't compare things to a time they didn't live so only older people mention their age usually. I'm 17 rn been on the fediverse since 16 or maybe 15 I don't really remember.
Edit: I personally feel actively discouraged from mentioning my age (even irl i look older) not cause of safety or anything but I js feel like I'll be treated differently when people know I'm younger. Its happened quite often to me both IRL and online where I'll notice a distinct shift in tone after they know how young I am
- I'm happy there are at least some young people here.
Alright smarty pants. Let’s hear about some of your “minimal tech skills”.
- Well I studied CS, was a Unix sysadmin for a few years, then a consultant for a enterprise software company. But I've been in sales for 20 years, so that should count equally against me, although I do still have some linux servers at home. I'm probably still a bit overqualified for the task of signing up to the fediverse.
- I can open Word without blaming someone else for moving the shortcut!
- I can google error codes 😅

Do not cite the deep magic to me, witch, I was there when it was written.

Mastodon is the German nudist beach of social media. There’s a strong sense of camaraderie, but the average age is somewhere north of 50, and people under 40 instinctively cringe when they hear about it.

As a 1,000 year old vampire, I apologise for my kind skewing the average.

As a 2,000 year old prepubescent girl, I don’t know which direction I’m skewing it.

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

This is it. I grew out of reddit too. And it's funny cause when I started using it was around 2012-ish, and everyone was around their 20s/30s with the occasional edgy teen # chan refugee. Yeah we told a lot of the same dumb jokes still circulating now (cause it's more than half bots now), but now every single thread is literally ALL the same exact jokes I saw a decade plus ago, again and again, day after day.
At least this lemme gives a joke a few days to rest before trying to milk that old skinny cow again.

20 is old? Rip me then I must be a skeleton.

I'm 35 and seem to find people older than me on here fairly often. So I don't feel on when I'm on here, until I stand up.
The whole Internet is club penguin apparently.

above 50 here.

How would we know the average? I dont remember putting my age when signing up

Typical post broccolitude
On the internet, everything is known.
one data point is missing, all hope of computing the true average is lost. resort to standard deviation of the mean.
- Only one point? age is not asked in the signup form

If we're picking characters, I wanna be Uncle Iroh!

Yeah... I'm definitely Bumi

There are either a ton of 12 year olds on here or an ever larger number of 18 year olds.

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

Do me a favor and look up the word "ageism".
- I take it you haven't interacted with many young people since the pandemic
- Idunno if it counts as ageism when they're talking about stupid behavior among people with minds that are factually, biologically, not finished developing. Same reason it isn't ageist to say "ten year olds are not allowed to drive cars because they aren't smart enough to do it responsibly"

I'm 18, feeling like a fetus in comparison XD

Happy to be above the age of 20.toString()!

I thought I should feel old because everyone else is 20, but here the 20 year old is old and the meme was made by someone below 20????

Nah, I'm 30. It's just a relief to be on a community where the majority of the commenters aren't literal children.

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?

Kids are on tiktok and Instagram and short video clip based social media.
The people who grew up with the internet being a place where you type and read things to be social, are here and places like here.

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

Me, as a Gen X, just keeping under the radar...

Get back under that radar. We have to forget you exist!

Feels good.

I always somehow assumed it's lower. Around 16 if I had to guess. We need a poll

I'm curious if that's because you think people seem immature or something? I'm in my 40s, and work with people both older and younger than me. I can see comments across Lemmy that I wouldn't find unusual for here, except maybe a stronger leaning towards left leaning politics, privacy, etc.
I've seen a huge amount of immature adults.
- people seem immature or something?
  It's more about general toxicity and too quick to judge (edit: which I guess counts as immature), but I gotta say it has gotten better, likely due to said users slowly getting banned.
  I noticed multiple times that the person I was arguing with was suddenly removed by moderators.
I don't think many people on here are in highschool, I'm in my mid twenties and have always felt on the younger side here.
- I think the average age is probably 35 - 40. If you're here, you're here because you want the internet from the late 00s.

There is no fucking way. Some of yall are lying.

Pretty good and peaceful in my experience.

In my generation Reddit is associated with the basement dweller pseudo intellectual, so I'm hesitant to mention lemmy as a "better reddit". Most of what my generation uses is instagram and Tiktok

Older average age is a feature, not a bug. I hope fedi keeps out the under 40s

You hate us under 40s so much?
- I don't. Ignore that nonsense.
- some people don't age gracefully 🤷‍♂️ enjoy your stay whatever your age is
You sound delightful
I can see some 39 year old looking at this and going "darn it."