First of all, I don’t mean this post as a complaint, maybe more of a warning?
There is teenagers on the fediverse. Most of them don’t share their age, for hopefully obvious reasons. I’d say that a lot of the accounts which do a lot of posting/commenting are run by teenagers — because most adults probably wouldn’t have the time for that much posting.
While the young people of this generation are generally useless when it comes to something more complicated than microsoft word, the people who are good at technology, usually are very good at it.
most of my friends (most of which don’t know the difference between a laptop and a desktop) could understand the fediverse as a concept perfectly when I explained it to them irl.
So, if you’re in a really stupid argument with someone, try to remember that there is a small chance they are 14.
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Surprise, surprise. Some chunk of Reddit annoyances stem from kids running around amok.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
In short time it becomes increasingly annoying to browse let alone post to get past the anti teen rules filter. Not to mention all the young hormones commenting some stuff at you like it is school break slander or smh
One can always change instance though so it isn’t doom and gloom. The kids will have Lemmy.world and nice, enjoy it and have fun. It is the club penguin of Lemmy instances. We knew this would happen
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it gets exhausting for mods to get drawn into debates when it’s obvious the person is trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice” (vs what a lot of communities have which is “don’t be uncivil” followed by a 1000 item list of uncivil things that nobody will read and only exists for mods to point to after the fact). We got a lot of pushback like “who decides what being nice means?” (to which I would reply "if you truly don’t know what ‘nice’ means then you need to ask your mother) but if someone is ““concerned”” about a rule to “be nice” or “honest”, they are probably not someone that needs to be around anyway. It’s a discussion community, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own styles.
Great comment, great moderation. Also by the way it has come to my attention that your instance bans/warns users that merely upvote discovery hate posts? Or was it some other Star Trek instance?
I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.
I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.
I am sure you can get a loyal customer discount, after all you were a moderator
I don’t think all, or even most, of the low quality content comes from kids.
As a teenager who is relatively tech-savvy and on the fediverse, can confirm. I think it’s gotten to the point where even less technically inclined people can join fairly easily, but the more savvy are usually the first to flee from enshittifying platforms so we see a lot more of them here.
https://lemmy.cafe/post/14200034
Be careful admitting that.
Teenager ≠ underage, 18 and 19 year olds exist. But thanks for your concern. :)
Play with fire, get burned.
If you can’t take it, get the fuck out.
WHAT!!!??
TEENAGERS??
ONLINE???
Brooo I had no idea… how could this happen? I never would’ve guessed there could be teenagers despite at one point being one and using the internet. I get you’re probably pretty new to being online but like come on, the rest of the world doesn’t discover things at the rate you do…
I am a teenager.
Most people assume fedi has no one under the age of 20.
I never would’ve guessed 🙄
Get back to r/teenagers, where you belong!
But seriously, thanks for the reminder.
[email protected] has like 60 people on it.
Also, there’s no way I’m outing myself as a teenager on my main account.
Some are easy to spot because they don’t understand that being apologetic has little to do with apologizing, for example. 😅
I’m sorry?
did lemmy world ban somebody yesterday lol
i doubt the community will survive
Maybe, but I was on the internet as a teen and that went fine, being careful is a general thing in life.
But more importantly: adults have a phone and use it during work ALL the time. So I’m not so sure about the average age of the people commenting on here.
I was smarter than the rest of you all when I was a teen. It wasn’t until I became an adult did I get this stupid.
Hey, fuck you for calling adults stupid. Some of us have been stupid the whole time!
No, we’ve definitely gotten dumber as time has gone on. Especially socially; interpersonal skills have basically vanished since I was in high school.
WARNING To the People of Earth: Teenagers exist. BEWARE
Pretty much yeah, most people assume that no one under 30 is on fedi because its “hard” to use.
Fedi does screw heavy middle aged and male and US but any one who can handle Linux can figure our how to operate here haha
Yeah kids might be retarded tech wise now but there is always the nerds who excel at tech so they would naturally end up here
Careful there, there are boomers on lemmy
Start making the list, all of them are going to a FEMA camp staffed by Obama death panels just like fox news promised in 2012!
Just a heads up, thats considered a slur.
Also, you’re forgetting the germans! Fedi seems really popular there.
Do you mean skew?
18 here started when I was 17
What part of the fediverse is “hard” to use?
Lemmy is easier to use than the UBB forum I started to become active on at the age of 10 that was the entry point for me being on the Internet at all. Back then we didn’t have Markdown, but BBCode, and I had that figured out after a few weeks.
I think you’re way underestimating young people.
I started to think it’s because of the result from years of a lot of people being trained and marinated by big tech in siloed opaque social media and website sign ups, where everything is it’s own thing with almost no interconnectedness and communication between each other. So it seems hard when they (me too admittedly) see all this instance thing and federated that.
Also IMO fediverse has a too nerdy and being infodumped on image to me. That image, at least on the threadiverse side, seems to be toned down and normie-d with recent “campaigns” on reddit though.
You guys really do need to not be too nerdy lol.
I’m old. I’m not sure what part of lemmy is hard. It’s just sign up, click a few things, download an app if you want. I don’t even have to remember a password. You don’t have to know how to build a car in order to drive.
Yes, noticed the influx of youngsters recently in the daily posts of ‘how come my boyfriend won’t talk to me’, ‘why are the girls at school so jealous of me’, etc. Also, putting 19/f in the post. What’s that about?
I’m also old and I really don’t know what’s going on. You’re mostly right, I’m here reading stuff and it’s working fine for me, but when it comes to federated instances and mastodons, I’m not sure I’ll ever really understand what this IS
Truly hard to use I’d say are hubzilla and its forks. The rest of the Fediverse doesn’t require much knowledge and aren’t as hard as their userbases pretend they are (they aren’t even hard at all)
I am a young person. It made sense once i explained it to them, but they had no idea how to do anything without my help, at first.
The assumptions that people make about age boggle my mind. You know that the people who made the internet are all “old” now, right?
Yeah, though most people severely underestimate, or overestimate the internets age.
I’m 24 and I’m using it just fine. I’d say that after signing up somewhere and getting an app to login into, the rest is pretty simple and much similar to reddit
With lemmy? definitely! On the mastodon side of things? no. Mastodon seems to be for german middle aged bikers now.
Well, I don’t know. Mastodon seems fine to me too
Oh boy, I should get on Mastodon!
You should also check sharkey! calckey.world
Invite only instances are even worse because of constant fear of banhammer treatment for wrongthink and then making second account is kinda hard
How is Mastodon harder? (Legit question, not snark)
There is more missing replies/reactions, and picking an instance is a bit harder imo. Also search is completely broken.
Gotcha. Less difficulty and more just not matching up with expectations.
I’m 19 and assumed that there are at least a few. And with that I’m correct.
You are.
Is this the popular assumption?
I actually do appreciate this reminder
I’ve long assumed that many (most?) of the tankies, and of hexbear’s userbase in general, are teens.
You would probably be right. Teenagers change political ideologies every other month.
The Lemmy devs themselves are around 18, I think.
One of them has a kid, so not too sure about that
That would explain their behavior.
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It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.
In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.
It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.
And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.
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Assuming someone to develop a sufficient consciousness of their time starting with age 10 that would mean anything before 2010.
In all practical matter, people who are 25 now, cannot have any practical recollection of the US invasion of Iraq and are only having broad ideas of the 2007 financial crisis.
That is indeed scary.
You are either a 14 year old socialist furry or a 35 year old Linux user on the fedi. No in between
Ooof well older than that Sonny…
Sometimes much older
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What if I’m a 21 year old socialist Linux user?
I am a 30 year old socialist furry Linux user on the fedi. But that’s just the exception that proves the rule.
Teenagers now get banned if they tell their age anyway: [email protected]
Meh. At least pretending to be an adult feels like a pretty low bar.
Nobody should pretend and nobody should have to li
Also, nobody should volunteer age info for no reason… Esp under age crowd. Fucking pedos everywhere
Thats why I made this post. If a teenager is on the fediverse, they will know how to evade a ban.
Makes sense!
And what’s the problem with that?
Laws don’t currently make a concession for federated social media. If the law in an instance’s jurisdiction says that users on a platform must be of a certain age, then for practical/enforcement purposes it makes no difference if they’re local or federated.
FWIW, I also ban people under age 18 on my instance (local and federated). Obviously I can’t know everyone’s age, but if someone offers it and I become aware, and it’s below the minimum age set in our policy, then they’re banned until they’re of age - simple as that.
I’m in the US, so 13 is the minimum age by law for most services (COPPA), and there’s various grumblings to increase the age specifically for social media, so I’m playing it safe with 18 which is the age you’re legally considered an adult.
Considering some of the stuff that gets posted here (legitimately and via bad actors), then my legal liabilities are less as I’m going out of my way to only serve adults on the platform. Mind you, I’m running this as a hobby / volunteer and do not have a team of lawyers on hand.
Lemm.ee goes with 16, as does Blahaj.
The case linked was kind of an edge case as that user is turning 18 in a few months.
Where does .ee say they only allow 16+? couldn’t find it myself.
Our site, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 16 years old. If you are under the age of 16, per the requirements of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) do not use this site.
From a bit of clicking around, its linked no-where but the footer, so if you’re making an account they don’t tell you to read it. Easy to miss.
Quoth Article 8:
- Where point (a) of Article 6(1) applies, in relation to the offer of information society services directly to a child, the processing of the personal data of a child shall be lawful where the child is at least 16 years old.
Where the child is below the age of 16 years, such processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child.
Member States may provide by law for a lower age for those purposes provided that such lower age is not below 13 years. - The controller shall make reasonable efforts to verify in such cases that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child, taking into consideration available technology.
- Paragraph 1 shall not affect the general contract law of Member States such as the rules on the validity, formation or effect of a contract in relation to a child.
The referenced point (a) is in the conditions for data processing to be lawful:
the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;
In essence: The age of consent is 16 when it comes to your personal data. A completely different question is whether lemm.ee even processes personal data, even more so in a matter that requires consent. Because unless you doxx yourself lemm.ee knows nothing more about you than your IP and, presuming best practices, only keeps limited logs around for strictly technical purposes which don’t need consent. That point (a) is only one condition under which personal data can be processed, there’s also b, c, d, e, and f.
…not that I’m saying that the legal notice is bad it’s good. It’s overzealous and overcautious going beyond the letter of the law and event intent, reaching into the fabled realms of actually giving a fuck. Like, if the law says “assault is bad” then this notice is saying “please all cuddle, ok?”
- Where point (a) of Article 6(1) applies, in relation to the offer of information society services directly to a child, the processing of the personal data of a child shall be lawful where the child is at least 16 years old.
To any teens who come across this post, do NOT admit you’re underage or were underage at time of account creation anywhere, anytime for any reason
It’s like Rule 1 of the internet.
Sincerely, The kids who grew alongside the internet since the 90s
Even if the instance doesn’t have any rules about it?
That is not Fediverse specific. That’s general internet behaviour.
I was totally above 13 or had parental consent when I went to forums in the early 2000s. I totally wasn’t actually 9.
It’s wild to me this concept disappeared? It’s literally never been a good idea to reveal you’re a minor online. The laws are against you. Companies don’t want to deal with a curated minor experience, even less so in the current times. If they do, you get the crappier version of things.
The worst thing to happen to the Internet is when Facebook normalized using your real name and real info online.
I agree. The main thing is teenagers wanting to discuss stuff about them, like on r/teenagers on reddit.
If it’s anything like Reddit, it would devolve into being mostly creepy adults.
Back in the days we’d get free hosting and slap phpBB on it. Run for kids by kids, no pesky adult rules!
Those were the days. No credit cards needed, no nothing, just free 50MB of Apache/MySQL/PHP4 hosting with no strings attached.
If the fediverse was a thing I’d probably have had my own instance starting age 14-15ish.
Its a shame that all “modern” forum softwares are really resource heavy.
A/S/L
14/f/under your floorboards
14/f/under your floorboards
Translation: Either “FBI” or “40/m/under your floorboards”
No, I’m just stuck. Bring a water-based lubricant to help me come out
Sir this is a Lemmy
A/N - narnia
17/F/Cali
Nice one, my fed Joe
On my main account (this is a throwaway, if the username didn’t already suggest that) I’m sure if you dug around enough you’d find out my age, but it would be a lot of effort.
I was -1 years old when creating this account🚬
Believe it or not BAN
Duh, I was born in 1901, why do you ask?
1901-01-01? Me too!
Good to meet you birthday buddy
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They won’t, lemm.ee has a policy on federation, and they wouldn’t let kids get in the way of it.
Minors are going to access the internet no matter what you do, it’s on them an their underdeveloped brains on whether or not they can handle it.
If their parents don’t care enough, then let them be raised here, amongst the stable minds that think anything to the left of burning kids alive for warmth is tankieism (.world) or anything to the right of luxury gay space communism is fascism (all the sane instances).
Lemm.ee allows minors out of the same school of thought why it allows federation with nearly all instances there are, including NSFW: liberalism (as in: freedom)
I’d say that a lot of the accounts which do a lot of posting/commenting are run by teenagers — because most adults probably wouldn’t have the time for that much posting.
Challenge accepted.
Most of us would post on forums as teens back in the day, so it’s hypocritical to try to keep them from doing it too. The only places we should run them off would be communities we specifically make for adults. They don’t necessarily have to be NSFW. Sometimes it’s just nice to have a community where everyone is old enough that they get the same references and are in similar stages in life.
General music and hobby related communities really shouldn’t be blocked off, though.
we would not stop from accessing adult stuff, if we wanted to. so trying to hard prevent them now would be hypocritical too imo. it is our job as parents to prepare them as good as we can.
I mean, as a teenager, if a community says in the rules that its for adults only, I’d avoid it.
Honestly I think that’s unusual for a teenager
I don’t think so.
Press x to doubt
A friend and I just yesterday talked about that and how we both visited some random sites/communities back then. How we had ICQ Chats with adults as 13-somethings, phone calls, about the blogosphere, how some Internet friends asked whether you needed something and send it on a disc via Mail.
I suppose if I were a teenager again, I would be here too.
