Interesting. I'm 46, and sometimes I feel like a frog in boiling water online. I can ignore things I don't like, generally, but I feel like the www I love/d has been replaced by a maze of ads.

I was thinking about how the www up until, say, Covid was selecting for and encouraging a libertarian bias, but nowadays -- now that the technical capabilities exist! -- there are many moves towards conformity.

communities here I suppose

Yes. Never call them 'comms'.

I'm in my 40's and by golly do I like charts.

I mean I realize that my whole topic might specifically attract only my age group to respond. But it's not like I'm making an academic study 😅

In my 40's. Got permabanned for stating pedophiles should be killed.

Late 40s. Left Reddit after it became clear what they had become; joined Lemmy to ask an obscure question about Selenium.

Lolllllll.

Internet in the "good OK days" was very (^1000000) slow.

But, on the bright side, sales funnels didn't exist

I think you could summarize by saying: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

1. Yeah, really.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

"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."

I'm 22 and I came to Lemmy after my Reddit account got permanently banned/suspended for no reason

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.

1. Reddit banned me for being pro-ukraine

Impressive

Like 2-3 years old (as of 2026)
I was unhappy with Reddit's userbase(before i cared about company track records), and i randomly stumbled across lemmy.(ion remember how)
The small size makes finding communities hard but its workable.

Early 30s. API debacle.

59, been on Mastodon for years, saw the occasional mention of Lemmy and came over for a look some time ago to lemmy.world, then to the instance I'm on now. Also have a piefed alter and the original .world alter.

Spend more time here than on Mastodon these days, I find the shitposting here is if a higher equality.

Had used reddit in the way distant past but it annoyed me the usenet structure was being centralised and replicated for $ off the back of "slaves" and left way back.

same

60 here, you've seen some shit :)