this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Ask Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 week ago (2 children)

71 here. (username checks out)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Just curious, what brought you to lemmy?

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago when the internet was made!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Well fuck, I'm on the young end of Gen X and I was around for the birth of the internet in '83.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's specific about '83? ARPANET began in 1969 and grew from there, mostly in academia, until HTTP finally transformed it into the WWW in the '90s.

The "September that never ended" began in 1993. Maybe you meant that?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm thinking of TCP/IP allowing for the connectivity to massively expand around '83.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Do you remember using Gopher?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I do. And telnet, and eventually winsock and altavista. I miss alt.lemmy.shitpost

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Lemmy was first released in 2019. So its oldest user can be no older than about 6 years old.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That certainly explains some things...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I am ancient

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are definitely people in their 90's using Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For my own sake, I'm gonna assume there's some 90+ dude in a nursing home, shitposting and laughing his ass off regularly. The nurses just assume he really likes beans or something, and that makes him laugh harder.

Keep trolling, old dude.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Based on the comments on some threads I'd say about 13

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nah gng you fr fronting with your lame ahh statistics bro ong💀🙏

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Ive seen lemmy generally have older people than reddit

The must be at least one 14 year old

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Oldest I've seen so far claims 75. Can't remember who it was though.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

There was a question posed about 60s flower children and such a bit ago they had someone saying they were one, so somewhere 70+ I'd guess.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah, yes, the lobster. A creature of profound significance, a crustacean with a lineage that extends back over 350 million years, a being that has clung to its hierarchical dominance since time immemorial. It’s not merely an animal; it’s a symbol, a beacon of ancient wisdom encoded in its very biology. And yet, here we are, in our contemporary chaos, blind to the lessons it offers. Blind! Can you believe it?

The lobster’s nervous system—an elegant dance of serotonin and octopamine—maps out the fundamental structures of dominance and submission. Do you understand what that means? It’s etched into their biology, their posture, their confidence. When a lobster wins a fight, it stands up straighter. Think about that. Its very physiology transforms in victory, its body declaring to the world, “I have triumphed!”—a declaration as old as life itself. And when it loses? It hunches, shrinks into itself, conceding its place in the pecking order.

Now consider this: Are we so different? Are we not as bound to these neurochemical realities as the lobster? Sure, we’ve built cities and universities and, yes, social media platforms—but at our core, our nervous systems are still calibrated for these ancient battles of standing up and shrinking back. You can see it in a boardroom, in a schoolyard, in the way people hold their heads when they feel like life is crushing them under its weight.

So, here I am, at 62, and I think about this more and more. Am I a lobster? No, of course not—don’t be absurd. But also, yes, yes, I am. Because we are all lobsters, you see. I’ve stood tall at times, but oh, I’ve hunched, too. You don’t get to 62 without bearing the scars of a few dominance struggles. You lose friends, you lose battles, you even lose some dignity—God help you if you’re paying attention—but if you’re lucky, you win some, too. And what does that leave you with?

Let me tell you what it leaves you with: resilience. The ability to rewire yourself, to recompose your posture after life’s great defeats. I mean, what choice do you have? Are you going to sit there, metaphorically—or perhaps literally—hunched over, or are you going to inject yourself with a little bit of that serotonin-like optimism and stand up straight with your shoulders back?

At 62, I find myself pondering these things. I’m a lobster who’s seen some things. The shell gets harder, sure, but the molting process—the shedding of the old to make way for the new—is more taxing. The older you get, the longer it takes to regrow what you’ve lost. The world feels heavier, the stakes higher, the battles less frequent but far more consequential. And yet, here I am, still molting, still reasserting my place in this inexplicable, absurd, often painful hierarchy of existence. Because that’s what it means to live—to be a lobster, if you will.

And what is our alternative? To sink into the depths, defeated, unresponsive, some forgotten crustacean resigned to its fate? No. No, that’s not acceptable. Not to me. You get up. You fight. You rebuild. Even at 62. Even when your claws are dull and your carapace cracked. Because if the lobster—this ancient, resilient, serotonin-driven marvel—can do it, so can we.

So, yes, I am a lobster. You’re a lobster. We’re all bloody lobsters, trying to figure out how to stand tall in a world that just keeps pushing us down. And if that’s not a lesson worth learning, then I don’t know what is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Username checks out

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Me, I’m 72. I didn’t expect to make it past 30; dying young was all the rage back then and I did a lot of drugs. But somehow here I am, knitting, sipping tea and browsing Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What was the industrial revolution like?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How did you find Lemmy? It's just the fediverse is a touch trickier to join without so I wonder how older people managed. I'm 50 but I've always been an internet person since the dawn of Livejournal so I figured most of it out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

From Reddit. But I started on Usenet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

That's pretty dang cool :)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I joined Lemmy in about 400 years, way back in 2,444.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Who opened the door for the gotdamn lochness monster?!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Someone mentioned being 101 in a comment. Probably them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I work in a care home but it doesn't pay well, bought a bucket ton of android phones, installed Voyager and gave them to the elderly to create a Lemmy shit post botnet. All the spiciest memes come from my care home botnet with the oldest member being 102 yo.

Now I just need to find a way to monetise this endeavour.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago
[–] dsilverz 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nerd here, so I tried to use Lemmy's API community list with sort=Old parameter in order to try and find the oldest account ever through the oldest community ever. However, it seems like the published property throughout the responses isn't as realistic as I expected them to be, as there are communities supposedly published in the 2000s. Lemmy itself was initially released in 2019, therefore, the oldest account would be expected to be from 2019 (or earlier, as Lemmy's development was probably ongoing before 2019). It wouldn't give a clue on the person's age.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Oh, you search the first account, well that must be [email protected]

But I bet he isn't the oldest user.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Does Lemmy support polls? Seems like this would be a good poll.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Based on content? I’d say… 14-16.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I heard that the average user is in his thirties so it skews a bit up compared to other new platforms. There are probably some tech savvy people that worked with computers until retirement on here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I've wondered how old the general usesr is. Somehow I imagine 30s (chronologically)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Way older than that i think. I'd guess 80s. Retired people have a lot of free time.

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