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.
- Reddit banned me for being pro-ukraine
Late 20’s
I used reddit app so the api fiasco, while it bothered me on a fundamental level, did not directly affect me.
Then I read some article about the potential for reddit to create paid subreddits or something?
I don’t remember exactly why paywalled subreddits bothered me so much, but it was enough for me to decide to leave.
Early 50’s. Came here to step out of the tentacles of billionaire-led corporations and avoid an enshitified online world of bots and data harvesting. Small learning curve to gain access but will worth it.
I’m 22 and I came to Lemmy after my Reddit account got permanently banned/suspended for no reason
40s. Pretty much the same as a lot of folks, grew tired of the Reddit bot-verse as well as kept getting banned for encouraging Shermination and posting pictures of Mussolini’s hanging corpse. Not incredibly tech savvy, but yeah, closing in on 30yrs of being on the internet. I still remember the first time I ever logged on. It was at a friend’s house, he went into a chatroom, someone sent us incest themed porn and asked if we want to roleplay a dirty Peter Pan and Wendy chat. Welcome to the internet!
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.
Late 20s, moved to lemmy during the Reddit API scandal like a lot of others, so it’s a deliberate anti-corporate choice. I’ve always been techy (I worked as a software developer at the time I made the switch) and I’ve always hated the corporate social media platforms. Reddit was the only social media that I ever used extensively and the API fiasco was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This may or may not be true for others who switched around the same time but it coincided with my political views becoming more radical; I used to consider myself a social democrat but by the time I fled Reddit I fully considered myself socialist and was on my way to becoming an anarchist.
Late 30s; got tired of getting constantly banned for every god damn thing. When they killed off my favorite reddit app that was the last straw.
Fuck reddit and fuck that little pedophile Spez.
“We don’t have enough personal data points from fediverse users to track consumer data points”
“…I know. I’ll just ask them to give me their personal info. Trust me, this always works.”
“No way. They care about their anonymity, it’s the reason a lot of them are there.”
41, came to Lemmy during the API thing.
I think I’m pretty rare on Lemmy: I use Windows on my PC (although I’ve dabbled in Linux) and I don’t work in a tech field at all.
I’m 30. Came here after Reddit perma-banned me and this was recommended as an alternative. Found an app that basically makes it look like Reddit so it was easy to transfer over.
- Yeah, really.
deleted by creator
early 40s. Reddit API scandal in 2023.
This is me
Same.
Me too
Same. Tried to go back late last year and it was a sloppy disappointment. Partner kept talking about Lemmy and after checking it out I joined. It sorta reminds me of old Reddit (joined in 2013) yet very different.
It’s a bit less clean cut for me. I started using Reddit in 2012, at first just the Minecraft sub and later mostly IT related stuff. I joined the threadiverse via a small niche Lemmy instance after the API scandal in summer 2023 but didn’t delete my reddit account until that November. I lurked on Lemmy for about a year before I started posting in earnest on the Worldbuilding community on .world. Now I’m bouncing around various fediverse platforms.
I wish NodeBB would take off as a platform. I want a home for more permanent discussion and personal connection.
Same!
In my 70s. In response to the U.S. aggression, I switched to Lemmy.ca, a Canadian owned media. Not many other Canadian owned social media sites out there.
RIP Nexopia
