Well I'm nearly 60, a Redditor from the Digg exodus days and I'm here. Not really sure wtf is going on but I'm sure over the next few weeks I'll get there. This is it now, I deleted everything else SM wise, everything gone. Just fed up with it all but I feel I need an outlet for my ideas and opinions!
reddit wasn't always the reddit we know today. It went through a lot of changes over the years, a lot of improvements. I see lemmy (and lemmy.one) as in that early stage. I had hoped to bring people with me from the exchristian community on reddit, but it doesn't look like I'm going to be very successful.
Which isn't to say that I'm giving up. Just that it's not going to be as easy as I hoped.
As an ex-christian, I am glad to see /exchristian go in its Reddit state.
I feel like most successful social networks tend to have grown a bit like that tbh.
You get the super techy early adopters, then you get the tech enthusiasts, then you get the regular tech literate and finally the network effect is strong enough to get everyone else remotely interested to sign up.
I'd say that also probably correlates to an inverted progression of people willing to put up with bugs, missing functionality and perhaps a bit more of a wild west as people figure out how they're going to interact with the network and the people on it.
The demographics of Reddit from 15 years ago were nothing like on Reddit 5 years ago and those are nothing like that which make up Reddit today.
Lemmy is a fantastic reminder of what Reddit used to be like. There's something relaxing and fulfilling about being surrounded by like-minded individuals who are here for good. Once it becomes too large and easy to navigate, you get flooded with trolls and creeps. I honestly don't care what happens to reddit at this point. The blackout and upcoming loss of third-party apps has converted me to Lemmy for the foreseeable future.
100% this, and it's why I still used old.reddit.com, because the new reddit site is just awful.
What I will say is there is less "noise" on our lemmy/discussion forums, and distinctly higher quality posts. This is something we'd like to encourage long term, particularly when people ask questions already answered quite clearly on our website.
A relaxed section for uncategorized discussion. Post a question, share some advice, let us know how your week is going, etc.