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.

  • RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    23 hours ago

    Honestly as an older person it very much feels like a lot of Lemmy is under 25. 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.

    • Saleh@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      12 hours ago

      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.

    • shikitohno@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      17 hours ago

      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.

      • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        15 hours ago

        I think a lot of the loss of civility comes from the fact that lemmy is just so left leaning. I don’t feel the need hear to defend the dems because I know that 90% of the users here understand that the dems are in fact at least marginally better than the other choice. IRL I run dem apologia on occasion because I might not like what they are doing but at least they pretend to care.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      23 hours ago

      You are either a 14 year old socialist furry or a 35 year old Linux user on the fedi. No in between