Hope a two part question is allowed but after mostly lurking a lot, I’m noticing that there do seem to be quite a lot of Xennials. But on the other hand, also plenty of rebellious youth.
In my mind I’m thinking that Lemmy userbase is (very broadly generalizing) dividing into people who saw internet’s early days and as such, aren’t scared of the slight technical hurdles to enter. They tend to be a bit worldweary but Lemmy does feel a bit more like OG internet, which they like (this is me). But also, there’s younger people who are techy enough to deal with the hurdles too but see using Lemmy as a sort of an act of rebellion against the mainstream internet (which I appreciate).
That said I feel like the two clash a lot since the former tends to have fewer shits to give than the latter. As often is the case in the whole history of humanity.
Obviously there’s plenty of people who don’t fall into either camps, which is why I’m curious. Lemmy is small enough to have a sense that there are actual, real, individual people here, as opposed to Reddit’s amorphous blob of a massive userbase most of whom seem like bots.
I’m 65 and I hate the generation labels. I genuinely think they were originally pushed as another propaganda mechanism to create further artificial divisions between people. There is no doubt that people of significantly different ages are often different in various ways, but the over simplicity of the named generations just provides another convenient way to stereotype people instead of understanding them as individuals.
I think I joined reddit in 2008. I’ve been involved in social media since the days of dial-up bulletin board systems in the late 70’s. (And I ran one of my own in the mid-80’s.) I had an email address on Bitnet in 1983 and was on Usenet in its early days. reddit was an interesting and open place for a while there and I enjoyed the variety, but most of it was becoming too cynical and tribal for me by the early 20’s. I discovered Lemmy a couple years before reddit’s API debacle, but that is what convinced me to drop reddit and focus on the Fediverse.
I like the decentralized model of the Fediverse. I think the idea that different servers can have different rules is healthy. I stay away from parts of it, but I have found plenty of communities that are friendly and interesting to me. After hanging out on several different servers, I joined Fedican and have been happy here. It’s a nice place to call my home online.