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’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.

how do you do, fellow adults?

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.

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

Not just fewer kids. But fewer conservatives too.

Gosh, I love it here.

all of you are wrong. lemmy looks like it does now because it's first of all and most importantly small.

the reason why it's small is that there are barriers for entry, be it effort needed to understand federation for the first time or choosing instance. "ooh just choose anything it's not that hard" shut the fuck up. it's a barrier because you can see that numbers are quite low, and just because you've come through it already doesn't mean it's not there

but there's bigger issue. depending on instance and how do you count, some 95%+ of new active users could have been rexxiters. this means that by coming there they have to leave reddit, and that means leaving communities that were there

average person isn't stupid or malicious or unenlightened plebeian. average person is just. average. because of small lemmy's size people there are subject to strong selection bias, namely on gaussian distribution of "how much do you care about moving there" that's far right tail that sits there. what are reasons for that, for every person that would be a bit different. some of these are FOSS enthusiasts or techlibertarians or softcore anticapitalists, this has some serious implications. some were banned from reddit but want replacement (some of these were shown door already, like exploding-heads).

now, crossection of "people who cared to come there" and "programmers" is reasonably big, as evidenced by programming.dev, but for any other unrelated topic there's much less. crossection of "people who care" and "people who are good at identifying mushrooms" or "aviation fans" or whatever is small, maybe too small to form new community. these people would need to leave reddit and their community and come there, doing nothing because they have no other fellow mushroom identificators to talk to. so, many don't. there's also probably negative selection of specific kind of people like some conspiracy theorists, at least for now

if you want to see lemmy grow, you would see dilution of that concentrated techbro sentiment with people who are otherwise average, but these people are also there to form new, specialized communities. you might want to gatekeep them out with some eternal september scenario, but it most likely won't work. personally i think that lemmy needs to grow a few times over for these diverse "unrelated communities" to form, and then things will get pretty sustainable

another thing is that there's no ads and no selection for hostile content or conspiracy theories, and that might be related to how lemmy's algorithm is not driven by engagement, at least that's how it looks like. and also bots, i've seen entire subreddits written by chatgpt or some dude who tried hard to do something similar by hand, and i hope to avoid this here at least for some time. the kids are alright

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

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.

Joke's on you, I'm a dog.

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.

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.

What do you mean? I'm 16/f/cali

I don't support age shaming. Let's not be those people.

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.

Lemmy is so good right now because there's no commercialization here.

OP I think you spelled idiots wrong.

Agreed. Reddit became horrible once everyone got on it.

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.

No kids? I am a kid

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