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Several weeks into the #TwitterMigration it seems clear to me the value of Mastodon is not that it is a Twitter replacement, but that it is a gateway technology to decentralization. Mastodon has flaws, I'm not claiming it's perfect, but many criticisms I've seen stem from expecting centralized services from a decentralized structure. It's up to us to try and explain the differences and set expectations for what alternative services can look like.
To this extent I'm really interested to know how the age breakdown of people on the #Fediverse. On one hand it would seem to make sense to me that most people here remember the "old internet" before the centralization and they're here to rekindle that flame of independence. On the other hand the youths are generally pretty up on this whole technology thing. I grew up on the internet and since then smartphones have become even more ubiquitous.
(Please boost for reach)
@mcneely 'the youths are generally pretty up on this whole technology thing'
I try to be careful about the conclusions I drew from that sort of thought. I was talking to someone who teaches computer science at uni and they were saying they've needed to start teaching 1st year students about directory structures because that's not really part of how 'the youths' are interacting with software anymore. It's all searching and curated experiences on smart devices that hide that sort of detail away.
@drV @mcneely I agree--college students that I work with are near incompetent when it comes to using computers (beyond face time and texting). I have to teach them how to save files in software (because their tablets don't work that way, one student told me). How to access the C: drive. How to resize Windows. They don't know ctrl-c. They don't know what a giga or a tera is, much less a byte. Or RAM.