Pretty much yeah, most people assume that no one under 30 is on fedi because its “hard” to use.

Most free time, rich teens spending their parents money drive our trends probably

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

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.

Discussions, arguments, uncontrolled debates, whatever you want to call it.

@Angelusz @throwaway Only with Nazis, racist and bigots.

The Lemmy devs themselves are around 18, I think.

You would probably be right. Teenagers change political ideologies every other month.

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.

I mean, as a teenager, if a community says in the rules that its for adults only, I’d avoid it.

They are, teenagers (saying this as a teenager) are hopeless. Tech became so easy to use that anything requiring a tiny bit of effort is impossible for these people.

At 14, me and most of my peers could navigate a file system on DOS, format floppies, install games from setup disks, and edit autoexec.bat files.

Yes, there is a huge difference between the teens of today and the teens of 25 years ago. Technological illiteracy is real thanks to the iPhone era and UIs becoming stupid simple to use.

The “iPad kids” meme didn’t originate from thin air.

This idea is absolutely laughable.

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

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.

As a teenager, I get in stupid arguments making stupid points because in my head, being right is important.

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).