I don’t have much of a problem either way as I don’t think I’ll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That’s fine. There’s clearly a more liberal audience here and that’s okay. I just don’t want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.
Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I’m new here.
Edit: Thanks for the rational replies. I was expecting to get lit up for even mentioning this topic lol.
I wasn’t meaning to imply it was maladaptive, just that the social norm is not for a 16 year old to get involved in something like this unless they’re already a bit divergent from the norm. Teenagers tend to do things their friends are doing, they congregate together, if they’re spending a lot of time in something like Lemmy it most likely means they don’t have strong social circles, because typical teenagers in the U.S. are on tiktok, instagram, and snapchat, and we only have like 60-70k lemmy users. Teenagers naturally gravitate towards the clique/niche that their peers use, and the evidence is overwhelming that teenagers are using tiktok, instagram, and snapchat more than any other social media and it’s not even close. Any teenagers currently using Lemmy are very likely to be LGBT, on the far left pipeline, or young tech enthusiasts, where their peers either don’t share their same interest, they don’t have strong social circles, or they’re in mostly rural areas.
Your average 4chan user back in the mid 2000s was a teenager in a rural town/suburb without any friends, not people in a major city where they had easy access to entertainment and social groups.